Effectiveness of student academic presentations: What do we learn from presentation guidebooks?

Abstract

This research is based on a survey of recently published presentation guidebooks designed for both general academic readership as well as scientific and technical communities. The primary objectives were 1) to examine how Anglophone academic culture views effectiveness of academic presentations and, respectively, determine the shared core principles which contribute to it; 2) to identify additional explicitly stated aspects of effective presentations, both general and/or area-specific; 3) to get a better sense of the generalizability of the language recommendations in the guidebooks by looking into whether they were derived from large language data sources or were based primarily on the authors’ subjective language observations.

Overall, the survey revealed that Anglophone academic culture has a consistent view of several core principles on which effective and successful academic presentations should be built. The guidebooks also offered a shared set of additional characteristics, associated with both the preparation and delivery stage of effective presentations. However, the majority of the surveyed guidebooks lacked in the depth and breadth of their treatment of the language use in presentations. The findings of the survey can be beneficial to instructors and novice presenters alike.