oral presentation communication studies

• - Google Chrome

Intended for healthcare professionals

• Access provided by Google Indexer
• My email alerts
• BMA member login
• Username * Password * Forgot your log in details? Need to activate BMA Member Log In Log in via OpenAthens Log in via your institution

Search form

• Advanced search
• Search responses
• Search blogs
• How to prepare and...

How to prepare and deliver an effective oral presentation

• Related content
• Peer review
• Lucia Hartigan , registrar 1 ,
• Fionnuala Mone , fellow in maternal fetal medicine 1 ,
• Mary Higgins , consultant obstetrician 2
• 1 National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, Ireland
• 2 National Maternity Hospital, Dublin; Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Medicine and Medical Sciences, University College Dublin
• luciahartigan{at}hotmail.com

The success of an oral presentation lies in the speaker’s ability to transmit information to the audience. Lucia Hartigan and colleagues describe what they have learnt about delivering an effective scientific oral presentation from their own experiences, and their mistakes

The objective of an oral presentation is to portray large amounts of often complex information in a clear, bite sized fashion. Although some of the success lies in the content, the rest lies in the speaker’s skills in transmitting the information to the audience. 1

Preparation

It is important to be as well prepared as possible. Look at the venue in person, and find out the time allowed for your presentation and for questions, and the size of the audience and their backgrounds, which will allow the presentation to be pitched at the appropriate level.

See what the ambience and temperature are like and check that the format of your presentation is compatible with the available computer. This is particularly important when embedding videos. Before you begin, look at the video on stand-by and make sure the lights are dimmed and the speakers are functioning.

For visual aids, Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Mac Keynote programmes are usual, although Prezi is increasing in popularity. Save the presentation on a USB stick, with email or cloud storage backup to avoid last minute disasters.

When preparing the presentation, start with an opening slide containing the title of the study, your name, and the date. Begin by addressing and thanking the audience and the organisation that has invited you to speak. Typically, the format includes background, study aims, methodology, results, strengths and weaknesses of the study, and conclusions.

If the study takes a lecturing format, consider including “any questions?” on a slide before you conclude, which will allow the audience to remember the take home messages. Ideally, the audience should remember three of the main points from the presentation. 2

Have a maximum of four short points per slide. If you can display something as a diagram, video, or a graph, use this instead of text and talk around it.

Animation is available in both Microsoft PowerPoint and the Apple Mac Keynote programme, and its use in presentations has been demonstrated to assist in the retention and recall of facts. 3 Do not overuse it, though, as it could make you appear unprofessional. If you show a video or diagram don’t just sit back—use a laser pointer to explain what is happening.

Rehearse your presentation in front of at least one person. Request feedback and amend accordingly. If possible, practise in the venue itself so things will not be unfamiliar on the day. If you appear comfortable, the audience will feel comfortable. Ask colleagues and seniors what questions they would ask and prepare responses to these questions.

It is important to dress appropriately, stand up straight, and project your voice towards the back of the room. Practise using a microphone, or any other presentation aids, in advance. If you don’t have your own presenting style, think of the style of inspirational scientific speakers you have seen and imitate it.

Try to present slides at the rate of around one slide a minute. If you talk too much, you will lose your audience’s attention. The slides or videos should be an adjunct to your presentation, so do not hide behind them, and be proud of the work you are presenting. You should avoid reading the wording on the slides, but instead talk around the content on them.

Maintain eye contact with the audience and remember to smile and pause after each comment, giving your nerves time to settle. Speak slowly and concisely, highlighting key points.

Do not assume that the audience is completely familiar with the topic you are passionate about, but don’t patronise them either. Use every presentation as an opportunity to teach, even your seniors. The information you are presenting may be new to them, but it is always important to know your audience’s background. You can then ensure you do not patronise world experts.

To maintain the audience’s attention, vary the tone and inflection of your voice. If appropriate, use humour, though you should run any comments or jokes past others beforehand and make sure they are culturally appropriate. Check every now and again that the audience is following and offer them the opportunity to ask questions.

Finishing up is the most important part, as this is when you send your take home message with the audience. Slow down, even though time is important at this stage. Conclude with the three key points from the study and leave the slide up for a further few seconds. Do not ramble on. Give the audience a chance to digest the presentation. Conclude by acknowledging those who assisted you in the study, and thank the audience and organisation. If you are presenting in North America, it is usual practice to conclude with an image of the team. If you wish to show references, insert a text box on the appropriate slide with the primary author, year, and paper, although this is not always required.

Answering questions can often feel like the most daunting part, but don’t look upon this as negative. Assume that the audience has listened and is interested in your research. Listen carefully, and if you are unsure about what someone is saying, ask for the question to be rephrased. Thank the audience member for asking the question and keep responses brief and concise. If you are unsure of the answer you can say that the questioner has raised an interesting point that you will have to investigate further. Have someone in the audience who will write down the questions for you, and remember that this is effectively free peer review.

Be proud of your achievements and try to do justice to the work that you and the rest of your group have done. You deserve to be up on that stage, so show off what you have achieved.

Competing interests: We have read and understood the BMJ Group policy on declaration of interests and declare the following interests: None.

• ↵ Rovira A, Auger C, Naidich TP. How to prepare an oral presentation and a conference. Radiologica 2013 ; 55 (suppl 1): 2 -7S. OpenUrl
• ↵ Bourne PE. Ten simple rules for making good oral presentations. PLos Comput Biol 2007 ; 3 : e77 . OpenUrl PubMed
• ↵ Naqvi SH, Mobasher F, Afzal MA, Umair M, Kohli AN, Bukhari MH. Effectiveness of teaching methods in a medical institute: perceptions of medical students to teaching aids. J Pak Med Assoc 2013 ; 63 : 859 -64. OpenUrl

This page has been archived and is no longer updated

Oral Presentation Structure

Finally, presentations normally include interaction in the form of questions and answers. This is a great opportunity to provide whatever additional information the audience desires. For fear of omitting something important, most speakers try to say too much in their presentations. A better approach is to be selective in the presentation itself and to allow enough time for questions and answers and, of course, to prepare well by anticipating the questions the audience might have.

As a consequence, and even more strongly than papers, presentations can usefully break the chronology typically used for reporting research. Instead of presenting everything that was done in the order in which it was done, a presentation should focus on getting a main message across in theorem-proof fashion — that is, by stating this message early and then presenting evidence to support it. Identifying this main message early in the preparation process is the key to being selective in your presentation. For example, when reporting on materials and methods, include only those details you think will help convince the audience of your main message — usually little, and sometimes nothing at all.

The opening

• The context as such is best replaced by an attention getter , which is a way to both get everyone's attention fast and link the topic with what the audience already knows (this link provides a more audience-specific form of context).
• The object of the document is here best called the preview because it outlines the body of the presentation. Still, the aim of this element is unchanged — namely, preparing the audience for the structure of the body.
• The opening of a presentation can best state the presentation's main message , just before the preview. The main message is the one sentence you want your audience to remember, if they remember only one. It is your main conclusion, perhaps stated in slightly less technical detail than at the end of your presentation.

In other words, include the following five items in your opening: attention getter , need , task , main message , and preview .

Even if you think of your presentation's body as a tree, you will still deliver the body as a sequence in time — unavoidably, one of your main points will come first, one will come second, and so on. Organize your main points and subpoints into a logical sequence, and reveal this sequence and its logic to your audience with transitions between points and between subpoints. As a rule, place your strongest arguments first and last, and place any weaker arguments between these stronger ones.

The closing

After supporting your main message with evidence in the body, wrap up your oral presentation in three steps: a review , a conclusion , and a close . First, review the main points in your body to help the audience remember them and to prepare the audience for your conclusion. Next, conclude by restating your main message (in more detail now that the audience has heard the body) and complementing it with any other interpretations of your findings. Finally, close the presentation by indicating elegantly and unambiguously to your audience that these are your last words.

Starting and ending forcefully

Revealing your presentation's structure.

To be able to give their full attention to content, audience members need structure — in other words, they need a map of some sort (a table of contents, an object of the document, a preview), and they need to know at any time where they are on that map. A written document includes many visual clues to its structure: section headings, blank lines or indentations indicating paragraphs, and so on. In contrast, an oral presentation has few visual clues. Therefore, even when it is well structured, attendees may easily get lost because they do not see this structure. As a speaker, make sure you reveal your presentation's structure to the audience, with a preview , transitions , and a review .

The preview provides the audience with a map. As in a paper, it usefully comes at the end of the opening (not too early, that is) and outlines the body, not the entire presentation. In other words, it needs to include neither the introduction (which has already been delivered) nor the conclusion (which is obvious). In a presentation with slides, it can usefully show the structure of the body on screen. A slide alone is not enough, however: You must also verbally explain the logic of the body. In addition, the preview should be limited to the main points of the presentation; subpoints can be previewed, if needed, at the beginning of each main point.

Transitions are crucial elements for revealing a presentation's structure, yet they are often underestimated. As a speaker, you obviously know when you are moving from one main point of a presentation to another — but for attendees, these shifts are never obvious. Often, attendees are so involved with a presentation's content that they have no mental attention left to guess at its structure. Tell them where you are in the course of a presentation, while linking the points. One way to do so is to wrap up one point then announce the next by creating a need for it: "So, this is the microstructure we observe consistently in the absence of annealing. But how does it change if we anneal the sample at 450°C for an hour or more? That's my next point. Here is . . . "

Similarly, a review of the body plays an important double role. First, while a good body helps attendees understand the evidence, a review helps them remember it. Second, by recapitulating all the evidence, the review effectively prepares attendees for the conclusion. Accordingly, make time for a review: Resist the temptation to try to say too much, so that you are forced to rush — and to sacrifice the review — at the end.

Ideally, your preview, transitions, and review are well integrated into the presentation. As a counterexample, a preview that says, "First, I am going to talk about . . . , then I will say a few words about . . . and finally . . . " is self-centered and mechanical: It does not tell a story. Instead, include your audience (perhaps with a collective we ) and show the logic of your structure in view of your main message.

This page appears in the following eBook

Topic rooms within Scientific Communication

Within this Subject (22)

• Communicating as a Scientist (3)
• Papers (4)
• Correspondence (5)
• Presentations (4)
• Conferences (3)
• Classrooms (3)

Other Topic Rooms

• Gene Inheritance and Transmission
• Gene Expression and Regulation
• Nucleic Acid Structure and Function
• Chromosomes and Cytogenetics
• Evolutionary Genetics
• Population and Quantitative Genetics
• Genes and Disease
• Genetics and Society
• Cell Origins and Metabolism
• Proteins and Gene Expression
• Subcellular Compartments
• Cell Communication
• Cell Cycle and Cell Division

© 2014 Nature Education

• Press Room |
• Terms of Use |
• Privacy Notice |

Visual Browse

Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Assignments

• Annotated Bibliography
• Analyzing a Scholarly Journal Article
• Group Presentations
• Dealing with Nervousness
• Using Visual Aids
• Grading Someone Else's Paper
• Types of Structured Group Activities
• Group Project Survival Skills
• Leading a Class Discussion
• Multiple Book Review Essay
• Reviewing Collected Works
• Writing a Case Analysis Paper
• Writing a Case Study
• About Informed Consent
• Writing Field Notes
• Writing a Policy Memo
• Writing a Reflective Paper
• Writing a Research Proposal
• Generative AI and Writing
• Acknowledgments

In the social and behavioral sciences, an oral presentation assignment involves an individual student or group of students verbally addressing an audience on a specific research-based topic, often utilizing slides to help audience members understand and retain what they both see and hear. The purpose is to inform, report, and explain the significance of research findings, and your critical analysis of those findings, within a specific period of time, often in the form of a reasoned and persuasive argument. Oral presentations are assigned to assess a student’s ability to organize and communicate relevant information  effectively to a particular audience. Giving an oral presentation is considered an important learning skill because the ability to speak persuasively in front of an audience is transferable to most professional workplace settings.

Oral Presentations. Learning Co-Op. University of Wollongong, Australia; Oral Presentations. Undergraduate Research Office, Michigan State University; Oral Presentations. Presentations Research Guide, East Carolina University Libraries; Tsang, Art. “Enhancing Learners’ Awareness of Oral Presentation (Delivery) Skills in the Context of Self-regulated Learning.” Active Learning in Higher Education 21 (2020): 39-50.

Preparing for Your Oral Presentation

In some classes, writing the research paper is only part of what is required in reporting the results your work. Your professor may also require you to give an oral presentation about your study. Here are some things to think about before you are scheduled to give a presentation.

1.  What should I say?

If your professor hasn't explicitly stated what the content of your presentation should focus on, think about what you want to achieve and what you consider to be the most important things that members of the audience should know about your research. Think about the following: Do I want to inform my audience, inspire them to think about my research, or convince them of a particular point of view? These questions will help frame how to approach your presentation topic.

2.  Oral communication is different from written communication

Your audience has just one chance to hear your talk; they can't "re-read" your words if they get confused. Focus on being clear, particularly if the audience can't ask questions during the talk. There are two well-known ways to communicate your points effectively, often applied in combination. The first is the K.I.S.S. method [Keep It Simple Stupid]. Focus your presentation on getting two to three key points across. The second approach is to repeat key insights: tell them what you're going to tell them [forecast], tell them [explain], and then tell them what you just told them [summarize].

3.  Think about your audience

Yes, you want to demonstrate to your professor that you have conducted a good study. But professors often ask students to give an oral presentation to practice the art of communicating and to learn to speak clearly and audibly about yourself and your research. Questions to think about include: What background knowledge do they have about my topic? Does the audience have any particular interests? How am I going to involve them in my presentation?

4.  Create effective notes

If you don't have notes to refer to as you speak, you run the risk of forgetting something important. Also, having no notes increases the chance you'll lose your train of thought and begin relying on reading from the presentation slides. Think about the best ways to create notes that can be easily referred to as you speak. This is important! Nothing is more distracting to an audience than the speaker fumbling around with notes as they try to speak. It gives the impression of being disorganized and unprepared.

NOTE:   A good strategy is to have a page of notes for each slide so that the act of referring to a new page helps remind you to move to the next slide. This also creates a natural pause that allows your audience to contemplate what you just presented.

Strategies for creating effective notes for yourself include the following:

• Choose a large, readable font [at least 18 point in Ariel ]; avoid using fancy text fonts or cursive text.
• Use bold text, underlining, or different-colored text to highlight elements of your speech that you want to emphasize. Don't over do it, though. Only highlight the most important elements of your presentation.
• Leave adequate space on your notes to jot down additional thoughts or observations before and during your presentation. This is also helpful when writing down your thoughts in response to a question or to remember a multi-part question [remember to have a pen with you when you give your presentation].
• Place a cue in the text of your notes to indicate when to move to the next slide, to click on a link, or to take some other action, such as, linking to a video. If appropriate, include a cue in your notes if there is a point during your presentation when you want the audience to refer to a handout.
• Spell out challenging words phonetically and practice saying them ahead of time. This is particularly important for accurately pronouncing people’s names, technical or scientific terminology, words in a foreign language, or any unfamiliar words.

Creating and Using Overheads. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Kelly, Christine. Mastering the Art of Presenting. Inside Higher Education Career Advice; Giving an Oral Presentation. Academic Skills Centre. University of Canberra; Lucas, Stephen. The Art of Public Speaking . 12th edition. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2015; Peery, Angela B. Creating Effective Presentations: Staff Development with Impact . Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2011; Peoples, Deborah Carter. Guidelines for Oral Presentations. Ohio Wesleyan University Libraries; Perret, Nellie. Oral Presentations. The Lab Report. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Speeches. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Storz, Carl et al. Oral Presentation Skills. Institut national de télécommunications, EVRY FRANCE.

Organizing the Content

In the process of organizing the content of your presentation, begin by thinking about what you want to achieve and how are you going to involve your audience in the presentation.

• Brainstorm your topic and write a rough outline. Don’t get carried away—remember you have a limited amount of time for your presentation.
• Organize your material and draft what you want to say [see below].
• Summarize your draft into key points to write on your presentation slides and/or note cards and/or handout.
• Prepare your visual aids.
• Rehearse your presentation and practice getting the presentation completed within the time limit given by your professor. Ask a friend to listen and time you.

GENERAL OUTLINE

I.  Introduction [may be written last]

• Capture your listeners’ attention . Begin with a question, an amusing story, a provocative statement, a personal story, or anything that will engage your audience and make them think. For example, "As a first-gen student, my hardest adjustment to college was the amount of papers I had to write...."
• State your purpose . For example, "I’m going to talk about..."; "This morning I want to explain…."
• Present an outline of your talk . For example, “I will concentrate on the following points: First of all…Then…This will lead to…And finally…"

II.  The Body

• Present your main points one by one in a logical order .
• Pause at the end of each point . Give people time to take notes, or time to think about what you are saying.
• Make it clear when you move to another point . For example, “The next point is that...”; “Of course, we must not forget that...”; “However, it's important to realize that....”
• Use clear examples to illustrate your points and/or key findings .
• If appropriate, consider using visual aids to make your presentation more interesting [e.g., a map, chart, picture, link to a video, etc.].

III.  The Conclusion

• Leave your audience with a clear summary of everything that you have covered.
• Summarize the main points again . For example, use phrases like: "So, in conclusion..."; "To recap the main issues...," "In summary, it is important to realize...."
• Restate the purpose of your talk, and say that you have achieved your aim : "My intention was ..., and it should now be clear that...."
• Don't let the talk just fizzle out . Make it obvious that you have reached the end of the presentation.
• Thank the audience, and invite questions : "Thank you. Are there any questions?"

NOTE: When asking your audience if anyone has any questions, give people time to contemplate what you have said and to formulate a question. It may seem like an awkward pause to wait ten seconds or so for someone to raise their hand, but it's frustrating to have a question come to mind but be cutoff because the presenter rushed to end the talk.

ANOTHER NOTE: If your last slide includes any contact information or other important information, leave it up long enough to ensure audience members have time to write the information down. Nothing is more frustrating to an audience member than wanting to jot something down, but the presenter closes the slides immediately after finishing.

Creating and Using Overheads. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Giving an Oral Presentation. Academic Skills Centre. University of Canberra; Lucas, Stephen. The Art of Public Speaking . 12th ed. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2015; Peery, Angela B. Creating Effective Presentations: Staff Development with Impact . Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2011; Peoples, Deborah Carter. Guidelines for Oral Presentations. Ohio Wesleyan University Libraries; Perret, Nellie. Oral Presentations. The Lab Report. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Speeches. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Storz, Carl et al. Oral Presentation Skills. Institut national de télécommunications, EVRY FRANCE.

Delivering Your Presentation

When delivering your presentation, keep in mind the following points to help you remain focused and ensure that everything goes as planned.

Pay Attention to Language!

• Keep it simple . The aim is to communicate, not to show off your vocabulary. Using complex words or phrases increases the chance of stumbling over a word and losing your train of thought.
• Emphasize the key points . Make sure people realize which are the key points of your study. Repeat them using different phrasing to help the audience remember them.
• Check the pronunciation of difficult, unusual, or foreign words beforehand . Keep it simple, but if you have to use unfamiliar words, write them out phonetically in your notes and practice saying them. This is particularly important when pronouncing proper names. Give the definition of words that are unusual or are being used in a particular context [e.g., "By using the term affective response, I am referring to..."].

Use Your Voice to Communicate Clearly

• Speak loud enough for everyone in the room to hear you . Projecting your voice may feel uncomfortably loud at first, but if people can't hear you, they won't try to listen. However, moderate your voice if you are talking in front of a microphone.
• Speak slowly and clearly . Don’t rush! Speaking fast makes it harder for people to understand you and signals being nervous.
• Avoid the use of "fillers." Linguists refer to utterances such as um, ah, you know, and like as fillers. They occur most often during transitions from one idea to another and, if expressed too much, are distracting to an audience. The better you know your presentation, the better you can control these verbal tics.
• Vary your voice quality . If you always use the same volume and pitch [for example, all loud, or all soft, or in a monotone] during your presentation, your audience will stop listening. Use a higher pitch and volume in your voice when you begin a new point or when emphasizing the transition to a new point.
• Speakers with accents need to slow down [so do most others]. Non-native speakers often speak English faster than we slow-mouthed native speakers, usually because most non-English languages flow more quickly than English. Slowing down helps the audience to comprehend what you are saying.
• Slow down for key points . These are also moments in your presentation to consider using body language, such as hand gestures or leaving the podium to point to a slide, to help emphasize key points.
• Use pauses . Don't be afraid of short periods of silence. They give you a chance to gather your thoughts, and your audience an opportunity to think about what you've just said.

Also Use Your Body Language to Communicate!

• Stand straight and comfortably . Do not slouch or shuffle about. If you appear bored or uninterested in what your talking about, the audience will emulate this as well. Wear something comfortable. This is not the time to wear an itchy wool sweater or new high heel shoes for the first time.
• Hold your head up . Look around and make eye contact with people in the audience [or at least pretend to]. Do not just look at your professor or your notes the whole time! Looking up at your your audience brings them into the conversation. If you don't include the audience, they won't listen to you.
• When you are talking to your friends, you naturally use your hands, your facial expression, and your body to add to your communication . Do it in your presentation as well. It will make things far more interesting for the audience.
• Don't turn your back on the audience and don't fidget! Neither moving around nor standing still is wrong. Practice either to make yourself comfortable. Even when pointing to a slide, don't turn your back; stand at the side and turn your head towards the audience as you speak.
• Keep your hands out of your pocket . This is a natural habit when speaking. One hand in your pocket gives the impression of being relaxed, but both hands in pockets looks too casual and should be avoided.

Interact with the Audience

• Be aware of how your audience is reacting to your presentation . Are they interested or bored? If they look confused, stop and ask them [e.g., "Is anything I've covered so far unclear?"]. Stop and explain a point again if needed.
• Check after highlighting key points to ask if the audience is still with you . "Does that make sense?"; "Is that clear?" Don't do this often during the presentation but, if the audience looks disengaged, interrupting your talk to ask a quick question can re-focus their attention even if no one answers.
• Do not apologize for anything . If you believe something will be hard to read or understand, don't use it. If you apologize for feeling awkward and nervous, you'll only succeed in drawing attention to the fact you are feeling awkward and nervous and your audience will begin looking for this, rather than focusing on what you are saying.
• Be open to questions . If someone asks a question in the middle of your talk, answer it. If it disrupts your train of thought momentarily, that's ok because your audience will understand. Questions show that the audience is listening with interest and, therefore, should not be regarded as an attack on you, but as a collaborative search for deeper understanding. However, don't engage in an extended conversation with an audience member or the rest of the audience will begin to feel left out. If an audience member persists, kindly tell them that the issue can be addressed after you've completed the rest of your presentation and note to them that their issue may be addressed later in your presentation [it may not be, but at least saying so allows you to move on].
• Be ready to get the discussion going after your presentation . Professors often want a brief discussion to take place after a presentation. Just in case nobody has anything to say or no one asks any questions, be prepared to ask your audience some provocative questions or bring up key issues for discussion.

Amirian, Seyed Mohammad Reza and Elaheh Tavakoli. “Academic Oral Presentation Self-Efficacy: A Cross-Sectional Interdisciplinary Comparative Study.” Higher Education Research and Development 35 (December 2016): 1095-1110; Balistreri, William F. “Giving an Effective Presentation.” Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition 35 (July 2002): 1-4; Creating and Using Overheads. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Enfield, N. J. How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation . New York: Basic Books, 2017; Giving an Oral Presentation. Academic Skills Centre. University of Canberra; Lucas, Stephen. The Art of Public Speaking . 12th ed. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2015; Peery, Angela B. Creating Effective Presentations: Staff Development with Impact . Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2011; Peoples, Deborah Carter. Guidelines for Oral Presentations. Ohio Wesleyan University Libraries; Perret, Nellie. Oral Presentations. The Lab Report. University College Writing Centre. University of Toronto; Speeches. The Writing Center. University of North Carolina; Storz, Carl et al. Oral Presentation Skills. Institut national de télécommunications, EVRY FRANCE.

Speaking Tip

Your First Words are Your Most Important Words!

Your introduction should begin with something that grabs the attention of your audience, such as, an interesting statistic, a brief narrative or story, or a bold assertion, and then clearly tell the audience in a well-crafted sentence what you plan to accomplish in your presentation. Your introductory statement should be constructed so as to invite the audience to pay close attention to your message and to give the audience a clear sense of the direction in which you are about to take them.

Lucas, Stephen. The Art of Public Speaking . 12th edition. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2015.

Another Speaking Tip

Talk to Your Audience, Don't Read to Them!

A presentation is not the same as reading a prepared speech or essay. If you read your presentation as if it were an essay, your audience will probably understand very little about what you say and will lose their concentration quickly. Use notes, cue cards, or presentation slides as prompts that highlight key points, and speak to your audience . Include everyone by looking at them and maintaining regular eye-contact [but don't stare or glare at people]. Limit reading text to quotes or to specific points you want to emphasize.

• << Previous: Analyzing a Scholarly Journal Article
• Next: Group Presentations >>
• Last Updated: Mar 6, 2024 1:00 PM
• URL: https://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/assignments

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• J Gen Intern Med
• v.16(5); 2001 May

Learning Oral Presentation Skills

Richard j haber.

1 From the Medical Service, San Francisco General Hospital, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, Calif

Lorelei A Lingard

2 Centre for Research in Education at the University Health Network, University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Oral presentation skills are central to physician-physician communication; however, little is known about how these skills are learned. Rhetoric is a social science which studies communication in terms of context and explores the action of language on knowledge, attitudes, and values. It has not previously been applied to medical discourse. We used rhetorical principles to qualitatively study how students learn oral presentation skills and what professional values are communicated in this process.

Descriptive study.

Inpatient general medicine service in a university-affiliated public hospital.

PARTICIPANTS

Twelve third-year medical students during their internal medicine clerkship and 14 teachers.

MEASUREMENTS

One-hundred sixty hours of ethnographic observation. including 73 oral presentations on rounds. Discoursed-based interviews of 8 students and 10 teachers. Data were qualitatively analyzed to uncover recurrent patterns of communication.

MAIN RESULTS

Students and teachers had different perceptions of the purpose of oral presentation, and this was reflected in performance. Students described and conducted the presentation as a rule-based, data-storage activity governed by “order” and “structure.” Teachers approached the presentation as a flexible means of “communication” and a method for “constructing” the details of a case into a diagnostic or therapeutic plan. Although most teachers viewed oral presentations rhetorically (sensitive to context), most feedback that students received was implicit and acontextual, with little guidance provided for determining relevant content. This led to dysfunctional generalizations by students, sometimes resulting in worse communication skills (e.g., comment “be brief” resulted in reading faster rather than editing) and unintended value acquisition (e.g., request for less social history interpreted as social history never relevant).

CONCLUSIONS

Students learn oral presentation by trial and error rather than through teaching of an explicit rhetorical model. This may delay development of effective communication skills and result in acquisition of unintended professional values. Teaching and learning of oral presentation skills may be improved by emphasizing that context determines content and by making explicit the tacit rules of presentation.

Oral presentation skills are central to physician-physician communication, but little is known about how these skills are learned. While the communication between physicians and patients has recently received increased scrutiny, 1 less attention has been paid to the nature of communication among physicians. Studies from medical sociology and medical anthropology report that oral communication plays a central role in clinical care. 2 – 6 In particular, the oral presentation of patient cases provides a vehicle for the collaborative conduct of medical work, 2 , 3 , 6 the teaching and evaluation of clinical competence, 2 , 4 , 6 , 7 the negotiation of professional relationships, 2 , 6 and the production of professional values. 5 , 6 , 8 , 9 While previous studies have described some of the language characteristics and socializing effects of oral discourse among physicians, they have not analyzed how these skills are learned or taught.

Rhetoric is a social science which studies communication in terms of context and explores the action of language on knowledge, attitudes and values. Rhetoric has been applied to other professions such as engineering, 10 business, 11 physics, 12 and social work, 13 but has not been previously applied to analyzing medical discourse among physicians. To increase our understanding of physician-physician communication, we used the theoretical framework of rhetoric to study how medical students learn oral presentation skills and what professional values are acquired in this process.

Twelve third-year students on their internal medicine clerkship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)/San Francisco General Hospital and 14 teachers (8 residents and 6 attendings) were observed for 160 hours, including 73 oral presentations on rounds (42 by students and 31 by interns or postgraduate year 2 [PGY-2] residents ). Observation was by a trained rhetorician (LAL) who made rounds and took call with the patient care teams for part of two 8-week clerkships (October and November 1997, and January and February 1998). Nonparticipant observation was conducted following standard ethnographic technique, 14 in which the observer dwells in the research community and, without engaging in the activities under study, records those activities and the relations between research subjects.

Observation was separated in time to allow detection of possible differences in presentation skills later in the clerkship year. The first group, a convenience sample consisting of 4 of the 8 students on the clerkship (2 students on each of 2 teams), was selected to allow in-depth observation of a small number of students and their teams (2 interns, 1 PGY-2 resident, and 1 faculty attending for each team). Students were observed during all activities of the clerkship for a 3-week period (approximately 100 hours). During this time, the mean number of observed presentations was 7.5 per student and 5 per house officer. Based on the data gathered from the first group, hypotheses were generated, and all 8 students on the clerkship during the second time period were observed (mean number of observed presentations was 1.5 per student) for a 2-week period during team work rounds, attending rounds, and/or presentation rounds with the clerkship director (approximately 60 hours); most oral presentations occurred in these settings. Saturation sampling (when further observations yield minimal or no new information 15 , 16 ) was achieved through this process. Subjects were informed of our interest in “how students adjust to the clerkship”; however, in order to minimize observer effect, we did not disclose our specific interest in their communication skills until after the observation period.

Discourse-based interviews 17 of 8 students and 10 teachers (5 residents and 5 attendings) were conducted and audiotaped. This sample included all the students on the clerkship during the second observation period and 5 of the 6 PGY-2 residents and 5 of the 6 team attendings during the same time period (those who agreed to be interviewed [all] and could be scheduled). Discourse-based interviews elicit tacit knowledge about language by having participants work with a discourse sample and explicitly justify content and organizational choices. Students were asked to arrange a written sample of patient material into oral presentation formats for different contexts and to justify and explain their choices. Teachers were given an already organized presentation sample and asked if they would present it differently in different contexts and to explain their choices. Teachers were also asked to interpret representative feedback statements selected from observational field notes. Different formats for the student and teacher interviews were chosen to reflect the preceptor relationship between students (creating the presentation) and teachers (critiquing the presentation). All students in the second group ( n = 8) also completed a postclerkship survey. General survey questions inquired about the difficulties students had in composing and delivering case presentations, the “golden rules” of case presentation they had learned in their clerkships, and the advice they would offer to clerks beginning this rotation. Table 1 describes selected demographic characteristics of study subjects compared with the UCSF reference groups from which they were drawn. None of the teachers in the study had specific training in teaching oral presentation skills.

Characteristics of Study Subjects and Reference Groups, %

Data from field notes and transcribed interviews were qualitatively analyzed for emergent themes in order to uncover recurrent patterns of communication. Analysis followed the method of grounded theory technique 15 in which textual data is organized into increasingly refined categories representing recurrent (“emergent”) themes. Final categories are checked with an expert insider (RJH) to ensure that they reflect the experienced reality of the discourse under study. Thematic findings from observations and interviews were triangulated using analyses of curricular documents, student surveys, and a review of the sociological, anthropological, and medical literature on medical discourse. Triangulation, a term from cartography, refers to the practice of collecting data from various sources in order to verify the accuracy of observational findings.

Although there were variations in presentation skills within our student and teacher groups (e.g., students demonstrated differing abilities, over time, to learn to adapt content to context), even after saturation sampling we did not find recognizable patterns to these intragroup differences. In addition, there was no discernible overlap between student and teacher presentation skills at any time in the study. Therefore, intragroup differences are not presented, and only intergroup comparisons between students and teachers are reported. Because no substantial differences were observed for students or teachers between the 2 time periods, the results were combined for analysis. Informed consent was obtained from all participants and the study was approved by the institutional review board of UCSF.

In our study, students and teachers had different perceptions of the purpose of oral presentations, and this difference was reflected in performance. Students described and conducted the presentation as a rigid, rule-based storage activity governed by “order” and “structure.” Students typically presented information in the order that interview questions were asked and in the same organizational format as their written records. Student presentations did not change in different contexts or situations. Students repeatedly attempted to present the same case details to the resident on work rounds and to the attending on attending rounds, even after feedback suggesting the diverse requirements of these 2 audiences. Moreover, when students were faced with alternative data arrangements in the interviews, they struggled to explain their preferences, demonstrating a fragile sense of what the “rules” of order and selection were based on. For example, in response to an inquiry about whether the sample patient's “10-year history of progressive dyspnea with exertion” could be moved from past medical history (the student's selection) to history of present illness [HPI], the student interviewee answered: “Geez, I might actually, well I don't really know…no, right, no, I don't know if I would be, I wouldn't be really adamant…well, I'd say no, don't move it because I think…” When asked to articulate reasons for their choices, students either verbally flailed (became dysfluent 18 ), as the above example illustrates, or turned to their sense of the “rules” as justification. One responded: “Well, it's ‘past [history]’ or it's ‘present [history]’, isn't it? His chronic venous stasis and nonhealing ulcers are in the past—I mean he's got them now, but he had them already, so it's past, not present.” Another answered: “Well, you could [move it to the HPI], I mean I think I'd want to, but you might get in trouble. That's not where it's meant to go.”

In contrast to students, interviewed teachers described the presentation as “the way [physicians] talk to each other.” Teachers reported that they approached the presentation as a flexible means of “communication” and a method for “constructing” the details of a case into a diagnostic or therapeutic plan. They described the presentation as both “a story you tell and an argument you make.”

Reflecting their social understanding of the purpose of case presentation, more expert presenters (interns and residents) changed their presentations in response to differing contexts. For example, a resident was observed modifying the same case presentation for 3 different contexts: a telephone request for a specialty consultation, an acute care presentation to the intensive care unit (ICU) team, and a presentation to the medicine team faculty physician at attending rounds. Similarly, interns were often noted to solicit selection guidance from their residents as a strategy for deciding what should be included in their postcall rounds presentation. They would ask questions such as, “Do you want the whole physical exam [or all the lab values] or just the pertinent positives?” Or, more directly, “Which labs would you like?” In the busy postcall context, these interns have learned that offering less, and letting their resident choose, is better than offering more.

The expert's contextual flexibility was also evident in interview responses. In interviews, both resident and faculty teachers explained the changes they would make in the sample presentation in terms of contextual influences, and invariably requested of the interviewer details about the audience and context of the sample presentation before they would comment on its content. Teachers also recognized that students did not understand the social purpose of presentation. They complained that students “forget about communication, who they're talking to and what that person needs and just present masses of information until you can't see the forest for the trees.” Additionally, teachers agreed that students were too wedded to structure, complaining that “if you give them section headings, they'll always put something under them, even if all the information we need is really contained in the first 2 sections of the presentation. They'll fill the written form and then present from it.”

Students in our interview sample recognized that effective presenters altered the structure and organization of their presentations, but could not articulate how, when or why these alterations were chosen. And, as in most modeling situations where teaching is implicit, the principles (for improvisation) were not articulated for students. As a result, students were not easily able to understand or mimic those successful presentations that they witnessed by more experienced team members. One clerk commented:

You know, the hardest thing about this [oral presentation] is that there is this very rigorous form, but the people who are really good at it don't use it—they just converse. So there's this structure that we learn and that I'm using to present my patient, but they want me to pop in and out of it—I guess to have all the details that following the structure implies, but then to play jazz with it, to ease in and out of it. But how do I know when it's okay to pop out?

Students were apt to see improvisation as evidence of the idiosyncrasy of experts, rather than as a function of the influence of context and purpose on presentation content. Thus, they had no awareness of which presentation “rules” they could bend at any given time, and why, and were unable to adopt these macrostrategies even while they sensed them in the presentations of senior team members.

Although most interviewed teachers viewed presentations rhetorically (sensitive to context), as “a fluid- and patient- and time- and situation-dependent activity,” most feedback that students received was implicit, acontextual, and brief. These characteristics are important and problematic. Student presenters received from their teachers, instructions that had been unmoored often from situations and experiences: “Make it shorter,”“Only tell me what is relevant,”“Only tell me what I want to know,”“Just the pertinent positives,”“Just the relevant data.” While “relevance” was cited by both teachers and students as the most important criteria for inclusion of material in an oral presentation and the most difficult to teach and learn, “relevance” was almost never explicitly defined by the teacher or determined by the learner. This lack of explicit and contextually based feedback led to dysfunctional generalizations by students, sometimes resulting in worse communication skills and unintended value acquisition. Two representative vignettes from our observation data, drawn from a larger set of similar examples, illustrate these issues:

On postcall work rounds John's detailed presentation is interrupted by his resident: “We can formally present him at attending rounds—just give a bullet on him, tell us why he came in, what's key in his history, you know…” Rather than editing, John simply begins to read his notes more quickly. Afraid of leaving out critical information and uncertain about what constitutes relevance in this situation, John does not know how to select information appropriate to this context without explicit guidance from the resident. At attending rounds later that morning, John applies what he has interpreted as a rule about conciseness and excludes most of the medical history, skips the physical exam altogether, and moves straight to the problem list and plan. He is surprised and frustrated when the attending interrupts, “Back up! I want to hear the history. I need to know what's going on here.” John has applied what he thought was a general rule about conciseness without being aware that the 2 contexts require different material in the presentation. In one case, the team already knew the patient from the night's admission; in the other, the attending had not yet seen the patient and needed a full report. The contextual differences were not articulated for John and he did not perceive them.

The next vignette also illustrates the problematic nature of feedback about presentations on rounds. But it is perhaps more disturbing because the student's misinterpretation of feedback allows for the possible acquisition of unintended and undesirable professional values.

Judy's presentation of a comprehensive social history for a patient admitted to the ICU for resuscitation following head trauma and alcohol withdrawal is interrupted by her resident: “Just give me the social context stuff when it's warranted, when it's related to the presenting illness.” Judy comments later, “Some people just don't have an interest in people's social lives or what job they have. I don't know if it's because they don't have the time or if it's because they're not interested…so I think there's just that line between how medical you make things and how much of people's lives you bring into it all.” Judy is therefore surprised and unprepared when the resident asks her about the patient's social situation, support system, and availability of programs for abused men prior to discharge. “God, I wish he'd make up his mind,” she says.

For the resident, the request for less social history reflected the acute care context and ongoing resuscitation. For the student, however, it suggested cultural values (social history is never relevant), sending messages about what counts as “medical” information and what does not. Without explicit articulation, the student missed the role of context in determining when social history is relevant in a presentation. The resident is unaware of both the student's errors: her failure to recognize the influence of context on content, and her assumption that social data is not medically relevant.

Our analysis of findings was framed by a rhetorical approach to communication. A range of language analysis methods that derive from the social sciences have recently been applied to medical discourse. 2 – 7 , 18 , 19 Like linguistics (the study of language structure), semiotics (the study of signs and symbols in language) or conversation analysis (the study of language delivery), rhetoric investigates the social relations enacted through language. The rhetorical model captures these relations in a model that breaks communication into four essential components: message, audience, purpose, and occasion. 20 This model places the message (content) in relation to its rhetorical situation (context), which is comprised of an audience, a purpose, and an occasion (the setting and circumstances). Using this model, we can systematically study the relation between any of these critical variables, such as the message and its effects on the audience or the purpose and its impact on the content. Our discussion of findings reflects the rhetorician's attention to the relationship between what we say to our students, what we teach our students to say, and what our students come to value, believe and practice.

Students' explanations of presentation purpose, content, and organization demonstrate a structural, formalized understanding of the case (which emphasizes content) that differs greatly from teachers' social understanding (with emphasis on context). Their approach makes students “stiff” presenters and inhibits their ability to recognize and respond to contextual influences in their oral presentations. One result is that students tend to be underselective and present masses of data because they do not understand the clinical or contextual principles for editing and prioritizing. Another result is that students interpret teachers feedback as “rules” about structure and content rather than reflections of context and audience. Medical students are rule-seekers (as are students in other settings 21 ), hoping at each turn to discover a rule to help organize the masses of new information they are encountering. Cryptic, acontextual feedback messages such as “just what's relevant,”“don't mix the past up with the present,” or “no social history, please” can easily look like rules rather than reflections of place and time. Once formulated, such rules may be blithely transported into new contexts, creating a cascade of errors that frustrates students and teachers alike. To students, the breaking of these “rules” may look like teacher idiosyncrasy instead of a reflection of differing content requirements for different contexts. Others have noted similar problems with misinterpretation of “indirect” feedback in a variety of clinical settings. 4 , 9 , 22 , 23

In addition to suggesting problems with the ostensibly “explicit” feedback students receive on presentations, our data reveal difficulties in the implicit processes of this learning situation. Modeling is a common vehicle for implicit learning, but our data, and that of others, 9 , 24 , 25 suggest that it can set the learner up for confusion and failure if it is not accompanied by an explicit explanation of what is being modeled. In fact, experts may not be the ideal models for novices. Experts in this discourse community, such as senior residents, have already mastered the conventions of oral presentation. Over time, they have asserted their credibility as speakers, and they have earned the right to, as the student said, “play jazz” with their presentations. By virtue of their expertise, however, these role models may offer misleading examples to students who are unable to distinguish between the required conventions and those which are more plastic in the hands of a presenter whose competence is established and who understands the impact of contextual differences on presentation content.

The theme of relevance repeatedly surfaced in our observation and interview data and in our review of written curricular materials and student surveys. This concept was pervasive in teachers' feedback on rounds, and readily acknowledged in interviews, by students and teachers alike, as the most critical and the most difficult aspect of a case presentation. Postclerkship student surveys also supported this finding; clerks reported that determining relevant content in their presentations remained a problem even when they believed that they were mastering other difficult aspects of the clerkship (e.g., knowledge, physical examination). Interestingly, we found that teachers rarely defined the concept for their students; rather, they presupposed 26 students knew how to determine relevance even while explicitly stating that students had great difficulty in this area. Analysis of curriculum documents related to oral presentation also revealed presupposition in reference to the principle of relevance. For example, the advice to “limit yourself to the pertinent data” presupposes that there are data and some of them are pertinent, but it fails to define how one determines which is which. Such presupposition can be a key factor in what medical anthropologists and sociologists have referred to as “hazing” or “pimping.” 27 , 28 Presupposing knowledge that students do not possess can trigger feelings of vulnerability and anxiety, conditions frequently observed in the clinical clerkships. 26 – 28 When asked to define the principle, none of our teacher-interviewees could offer appropriate, operational definitions of relevance although they had no difficulty enacting the principle in their own presentations. Experts' difficulty in accessing and expressing tacit knowledge and attitudes has previously been noted in medical practice 29 and in settings other than medicine. 30 , 31

From our analysis, we believe that the “relevant data” in the oral presentation are determined, by expert presenters, with reference to both clinical (patient-centered) issues and rhetorical (context-centered) issues. 26 But without a specific rhetorical framework and a vocabulary for contextual issues, these experts have difficulty explaining this differentiation to others. This distinction (between clinical and rhetorical relevance) is useful, for it explains a phenomenon that plagues the case presentations of novice physicians: the relaying of clinically accurate but rhetorically irrelevant patient information. For example, what is rhetorically relevant changes between a short case presentation to request a specialty procedure and a new case presentation to the team's attending physician, although the patient's clinical status has not changed. Conversely, a change in the patient's course, such as onset of acute shortness of breath on the second hospital day, alters what is clinically relevant even when the rhetorical context and audience (rounds with the attending physician) remain the same. What is clinically relevant may best be learned by expanding the student's biomedical knowledge and experience, while rhetorical relevance is addressed through specific attention to the purpose, audience and occasion of each presentation. We believe that recognition of the difference between the clinical and rhetorical dimensions of relevance can improve students' selection of presentation material, their interpretation of feedback and their comprehension of the purpose and effect of team communication. 26 Furthermore, such an operational definition of relevance can help teachers to articulate the reasons for success and failure of student presentations, potentially improving both the usefulness of the feedback students receive and the evaluation of their skills.

Our findings suggest that the current process of trial and error that characterizes the learning of oral presentation skills may be flawed and potentially dysfunctional. It could engender values that are in conflict with those we hope to instill in future physicians. However, we also recognize that the presentation “experts” in the study evolved from this very educational system; although it is not clear from our data how and when this occurs. So, why fix something that apparently works? We believe that the potential for inappropriate and unintended value acquisition, inefficient learning, student and teacher frustration, and delay in clinical acculturation argues for change and suggests that the learning process may be made more effective and efficient by an intervention to excavate implicit learning and improve explicit instruction. Genre theorists, who study the nature and acquisition of conventional forms of communication, debate this hypothesis. Some argue 32 that the learning of genres (standard forms of communication such as the oral presentation) is necessarily tacit, as experts cannot easily articulate their implicit knowledge and students need to experience the genre rather than be told rules that they may misuse. Others 33 argue that although authentic experiences are necessary, learning can be aided by the timely provision of information about generic structures, expectations, and “rules of play,” analogous to the value of an experienced coach to a novice athlete. Whether explicit, contextualized instruction can improve students' acquisition of medical genres such as the oral presentation is not currently known; but it is a testable hypothesis. Nonetheless, we believe that 2 rhetorically based 34 recommendations can be made which may improve learning and teaching of oral presentation skills. First, teachers can emphasize the contextual basis for presentations by communicating clearly and repeatedly how context determines content. Second, teachers can make explicit the tacit rules of presentation by carefully articulating the reasoning behind their feedback and assuring that students understand what was said.

Our study has limitations. First, this was a qualitative study subject to observer biases and interpretations. Second, the sample size was small. Repeating the study with different sites and clerkships and observers, and a larger sample size, would help to validate, generalize and expand our findings and might allow us to detect patterns to the intragroup variations we observed. Third, this was a cross-sectional study and so was not able to determine how or when students learn the contextual basis for presentation evident in our resident teachers. A prospective study of students at different times in their clinical training might help to characterize this transition. Fourth, the different formats for students' and teachers' discourse interviews could have effected the results. For example, it may be easier to say what you would do with a sample presentation (teachers) than actually do it (students). Conversely, our observational data support the differences noted between students and teachers in the discourse interviews. In addition, the different formats reflected the preceptor relationship between student (creating the presentation) and teacher (critiquing the presentation) which we were studying. Lastly, the presence of an observer on the team and the connection of the study to the clerkship director may have induced a Hawthorne effect, although this would probably minimize rather than exaggerate the problems seen.

We conclude that students learn oral presentation by trial and error rather than through teaching of a specific educational model. This may delay development of effective communication skills, impair ability to learn from modeled behavior and result in acquisition of unintended professional values. A rhetorical model based on explicit, contextualized instruction may improve students' acquisition of oral presentation skills and help students to recognize the social nature of the language they are learning. As teachers, we need to be aware that the language we use—what we say and not say, and what we encourage students to say and not say—can have powerful effects on student learning.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

ORAL PRESENTATION COMMUNICATION STUDIES-1 (1)

Related Papers

Julian Goldman

Zohreh Movahed

Jennifer Walton

Margaret Eleftheriou

Girma Birhanu

Monica Montella

Sathiyaseelan Shanmugam

Akash Ranjan

John W Sipple

RELATED PAPERS

Shaun Brennecke

Arezoo Hajrajabi

Journal of Anthropology of Sport and Physical Education

MIOMIR MAROS

ACTAS DEL VI CONGRESO DE ARQUEOLOGÍA MEDIEVAL (España-Portugal), Alicante 2019

Maria Teresa Casal Garcia

Cristiani Kobayashi

Hakan Ersoy

Frontiers in Pharmacology

Dr. Saba Tariq

Analytical chemistry

endocrinologialatina endocrinologialatina

Jurnal Psikologi

kurniati zainuddin

International Urogynecology Journal

Shelby Thames

Anais do VI Seminário Anual Científico e Tecnológico de Bio-Manguinhos

Ivano de Filippis

Diana Vizitiu

Advances in Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation - Volume 3

Michael Firstenberg

julio bravo

Water Resources Management

MOHAMED mohamed

Jurnal Serina Abdimas

albertus brandon

American Journal of Public Health

Jouni Jaakkola

Journal of Applied Sciences and Environmental Management

Adamu Lawal

call girls delhi

delhi call 9953056974 V I P B O O K C A L L G I R L sexy

Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics

Donata Marasini

Caderno de Graduação - Humanas e Sociais - UNIT - PERNAMBUCO

maria chaves

Journal of Insect Physiology

Scott Pitnick

Forensic Science Medicine and Pathology

Anju Khairwa

卡尔加里大学毕业证书办理成绩单购买 加拿大文凭办理卡尔加里大学文凭学位证书

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Learning oral presentation skills

A rhetorical analysis with pedagogical and professional implications

• Original Articles
• Published: May 2001
• Volume 16 , pages 308–314, ( 2001 )

Cite this article

• Richard J. Haber MD 1 &
• Lorelei A. Lingard PhD 2  

3259 Accesses

109 Citations

1 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

OBJECTIVE: Oral presentation skills are central to physicianphysician communication; however, little is known about how these skills are learned. Rhetoric is a social science which studies communication in terms of context and explores the action of language on knowledge, attitudes, and values. It has not previously been applied to medical discourse. We used rhetorical principles to qualitatively study how students learn oral presentation skills and what professional values are communicated in this process.

DESIGN: Descriptive study.

SETTING: Inpatient general medicine service in a university-affiliated public hospital.

PARTICIPANTS: Twelve third-year medical students during their internal medicine clerkship and 14 teachers.

MEASUREMENTS: One-hundred sixty hours of ethnographic observation, including 73 oral presentations on rounds. Discourse-based interviews of 8 students and 10 teachers. Data were quanlitatively analyzed to uncover recurrent patterns of communication.

MAIN RESULTS: Students and teachers had different perceptions of the purpose of oral presentation, and this was reflected in performance. Students described and conducted the presentation as a rule-based, data-storage activity governed by “order” and “structure.” Teachers approached the presentation as a flexible means of “communication” and a method for “constructing” the details of a case into a diagnostic or therapeutic plan. Although most teachers viewed oral presentations rhetorically (sensitive to context), most feedback that students received was implicit and acontextual, with little guidance provided for determining relevant content. This led to dysfunctional generalizations by students, sometimes resulting in worse communication skills (e.g., comment “be brief” resulted in reading faster rather than editing) and unintended value acquisition (e.g., request for less social history interpreted as social history never relevant).

CONCLUSION: Students learn oral presentation by trial and error rather than through teaching of an explicit rhetorical model. This may delay development of effective communication skills and result in acquisition of unintended professional values. Teaching and learning of oral presentation skills may be improved by emphasizing that context determines content and by making explicit the tacit rules of presentation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

“How to do things with words” in health professions education

Claudia W. Ruitenberg & Angela Towle

Development of a measurement system for complex oral information transfer in medical consultations

J. M. Nordfalk, P. Gulbrandsen, … J. Menichetti

Bolstering students’ written argumentation by refining an effective discourse intervention: negotiating the fine line between flexibility and fidelity

Carla M. Firetto, P. Karen Murphy, … Rachel M. V. Croninger

Lipkin M Jr, Putnam SM, Lazare A, eds. The Medical Interview: Clinical Care, Education and Research. New York: Springer-Verlag; 1995.

Google Scholar  

Atkinson P. Constructing Cases. Medical Talk, Medical Work: The Liturgy of the Clinic. London: Sage Publications; 1995:107–25.

Hunter KM. Doctors’ Stories: The narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1991.

Pomerantz AM, Ende J, Erickson F. Precepting conversations in a general medicine clinic. In: Morris GH, Chenail R, eds. The Talk of the Clinic: Explorations in the Analysis of Medical and Therapeutic Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates; 1995:151–69.

Arluke A. Social control rituals in medicine: the case of death rounds. In: Dingwall R, Heath C, Reid M, Stacey M, eds. Health Care and Health Knowledge. London: Croom Helm; 1977:107–25.

Anspach RR. Notes on the sociology of medical discourse: the language of case presentation. J Health Soc Behav. 1988;29:357–75.

Article   PubMed   CAS   Google Scholar  

Bordage G. Elaborated knowledge: a key to successful diagnostic thinking. Acad Med 1994;69:883–5.

Donnelly WJ. The language of medical case histories. Ann Intern Med. 1997;127:1045–48.

PubMed   CAS   Google Scholar  

Burack JH, Irby DM, Carline JD, Root RK, Larson EB. Teaching compassion and respect: attending physicians’ responses to problematic behaviors. J Gen Intern Med. 1999;14:49–55.

Winsor D. Writing like an engineer: a rhetorical education. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates; 1996.

Yates J. Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1989.

Bazerman C. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Activity in Science. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press; 1988.

Pare A. Discourse regulations and the production of knowledge. In: Spilka R, ed. Writing in the Workplace: New Research Perspectives. Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press; 1993:124–40.

Hammersly M, Atkinson Paul. Ethnography: Principles and Practice. 2nd ed. London: Routledge; 1995.

Glaser B, Strauss A. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company; 1967.

Giacomini MK, Cook DJ. Users’ guide to the medical literature: XXIII. Qualitative research in health care A. Are the results of the study valid? Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group. JAMA. 2000;284:357–62.

Odell L, Goswami D, Herrington A. The discourse-based interview: a procedure for exploring the tacit knowledge of writers in nonacademic settings. In: Odell L, Goswami D, eds. Writing in Nonacademic Settings. New York: Guilford Press, 1985:221–36.

Caldicott CV. What’s wrong with this medical student today? Dysfluency on inpatient rounds. Ann Intern Med. 1998;128:607–10.

Hekelman FP, Blase JR. Excellence in clinical teaching: the core of the mission. Acad Med. 1996;71:738–42.

Lingard L, Haber RJ. Teaching and learning communication in medicine: a rhetorical approach. Acad Med. 1999;74:507–10.

Perl S. Understanding composing. College Composition and Communication. 1980;31:363–9.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ende J. Feedback in medical education. JAMA. 1983;250:777–81.

Ende J, Pomerantz A, Erickson F. Preceptors’ strategies for correcting residents in an ambulatory care medicine setting: a qualitative analysis. Acad Med. 1995;70:224–9.

Bandura A. Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; 1986.

Eskedal GA. Symbolic role modeling and cognitive learning in the training of counselors. J Counsel Psychol. 1975;22:152–5.

Lingard LA, Haber RJ. What do we mean by “relevance”? A clinical and rhetorical definition. Implications for teaching and learning the case presentation format. Acad Med. 1999; 74(suppl):S124–7.

Konner M. Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School. New York, NY: Penguin; 1987.

Stein H. American Medicine as Culture. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press; 1990.

Novack DH, Suchman AL, Clark W, Epstein RM, Najberg E, Kaplan C, for the Working Group on Promoting Physician Personal Awareness. American Academy on Physician and Patient. Calibrating the physician: personal awareness and effective patient care. JAMA. 1997;278:502–9.

Giltrow J, Valiquette M. Genres and knowledge: students writing in the disciplines. In: Freedman A, Medway P, eds. Teaching and Learning Genre. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook; 1994.

Schon DA. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books; 1983.

Freedman A. Do as I say: the relationship between teaching and learning new genres. In: Freedman A, Medway P, eds. Genre and the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor and Francis; 1994:191–210.

Coe RM. An arousing and fulfillment of desires: the rhetoric of genre in the process era-and beyond. In: Freedman A, Medway P, eds. Genre and the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor and Francis; 1994:181–90.

Coe RM. Process, form and substance: a rhetoric for advanced writers. 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; 1990.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

From the Medical Service, San Francisco General Hospital, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, Calif

Richard J. Haber MD

Centre for Research in Education at the University Health Network, University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Lorelei A. Lingard PhD

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Richard J. Haber MD .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Haber, R.J., Lingard, L.A. Learning oral presentation skills. J GEN INTERN MED 16 , 308–314 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2001.00233.x

Download citation

Issue Date : May 2001

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2001.00233.x

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• medical education
• professional
• communication
• socialization
• social sciences
• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research