ETX2250/ETF5922

Communication in Practice

Lecturer: Kate Saunders

Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics

etx2250-etf5922.caulfield-x@monash.edu
Lecture 9
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Modes of Delivery

Typical Structure for Reports or Articles

Typical Structure for Journalism

For Presentations

Aim for thehourglass structure!

Your turn

Your turn

Match the type and length of presentation?

Type	3 mins	10 mins	30 mins	60 mins
Informal meeting
Lightning talk
Seminar
Sales pitch
Lecture
Other

Create ideas, not slides!

When creating a presentation

Start with content and key messages instead of fussing over with slides
What do you want audience to take away or take action on?
What stories can you tell?
What headline is specific, memorable and concisely describes your talk?
The order you did the work is often not the order you should present the work!

Plan, Plan, Plan

Take Away Messages

Building your story

Think about these key messages as your roadmap

Build your slides and visuals around them to support your story

Take aways

If someone summarises your talk after - What do you want them to remember?

Messages

Cognitive Load Theory (John Sweller)

We can only absorb so much information at a time.

Practical Advice

Base the number of messages on how complex each message is
Longer talks don’t need have lots of messages — just develop the ideas more.

Audience

Think about your audience

We can only pay attention for so long
Your audience will drift in and out focus
Give them opportunities to re-engage and catch up
Think about how much information they can take in

Contract

Contract

As a speaker your job is try to communicate your work
As an audience member your job is to listen
If you break the contract as a speaker
The audience can and will break their contract

No hostages!

Do not try to take your audience hostage!!!

Questions

Questions are good!

If the audience engaged with your talk you will get asked questions!
Getting asked questions are good!
So don’t be scared of getting asked a question.
If something comes up you haven’t thought of take it as feedback.

Your turn

Your turn

How many key messages can you communicate in presentations of the following lengths:

3 mins
10 mins
30 mins
60 mins

Designing your Slides

Human perception

From Messages to Outcomes

Principles of human perceptions and cognition extend to communication
After data analysis, you have to share the results or persuade others to take action because of the results.
Visuals and voice are better to communicate data than voice alone.

Let’s look at some tips

Text on slides

Don’t do this!

Many presenters fall into the trap of adding far too much text onto a single slide, which makes it extremely difficult for audiences to stay focused, follow along, or even understand what is happening. For example, you might start writing long sentences like this one, which really doesn’t need to be here, but continues anyway simply to illustrate that a slide can look busy, cluttered, overwhelming, and frankly quite exhausting. People usually stop reading after the first few lines, but the presenter keeps going, thinking that every single detail must be included for the slide to make sense, when in reality the audience is now scrolling mentally through their lunch options instead of listening. Additionally, using small font sizes to cram even more text onto a slide only makes it worse because nobody can read it from the back of the room, and even those in the front row are questioning their life choices at this point. Overall, this type of slide is an excellent example of what not to do in any presentation under any circumstances whatsoever.

In contrast - Empty space is great for grabbing attention

And don’t forget colour

and SIZE

Be audience-centered

Think about your audience when you design your slides

Learning Principles (Richard Mayer)

Multimedia Principle: people learn better from words and pictures than words alone.
Contiguity Principle: integrating text and visuals can lead to more learning.
Coherence Principle: superfluous elements irrelevant can disrupt and interfere with your key messages

VISUALISE

UNIFY

FOCUS

Color

Visualise. Color matters so select carefully and strategically.
Unify. Be consistent with color use throughout the presentation.
Focus. use color to draw your audience’s attention to specific parts of your slides

Type

Visualise. Consider choices for text carefully.
Unify. Be consistent with your use of type, e.g. use only 1-2 fonts for slides.
Focus. Use large text sizes. Minimum font size of 28 points is recommended.

Text Slides

Visualise. When possible, convert text to visuals.
Unify. Maintain consistency across presentation using similar layouts and structure.
Focus. Use hierarchy and layering technique to direct audience’s attention.

Data Visualisation Slides

Visualise. Make use of preattentive processing and other cognitive principles to make it easier for the audience to absorb the information in the data.
Unify. Link text and visuals, e.g. legends directly in graphs.
Focus. Remove or minimise non-essential elements.

Image Slides

Visualise. Use large, high resolution images that fill entire slide.
Unify. Be consistent in image use across slides.
Focus. Link text and images to draw audience’s attention.

Your turn

Your turn

Your audience will at times stop paying attention.

Discuss what can you do to help make sure you audience doesn’t miss your key messages in a presentation?

Quarto

What is Quarto?

What is Quarto?

A tool for creating documents, slides, reports, dashboards, and websites.
Combines plain text & code (R, Python, Julia).
All our unit slides are made in Quarto!
Here is cheat sheet for how to use Quarto

Why use Quarto?

Reproducible: text, code, and visuals all live and update together.
Flexibility: HTML, PDF, Word, slides, websites.

Parts of Quarto

Parts of Quarto

1. yaml header

Sets the title, format, options
At the top enclosed in ---

2. Markdown Content

Headings, text, lists, images
The narrative part of your document

3. Code Chunks

Differentiated from text using back ticks e.g. ```
Work for R / Python / Julia code
Generates tables, plots, analysis

Example: Live Demo

Let’s look at an example : File > New File > Quarto Document

Tip

You can swap between the code version and visual view

Important

And don’t forget to Render your document to generate the output file

Code chunks

You can control how code and outputs appear.

Useful options include:

echo: show the code? (true/false)
message: show messages?
warning: show warnings?
eval: run the code or not
fig-width / fig-height: control plot size
fig-align: “left”, “center”, or “right”
cache: reuse results to speed up rendering

Your turn

Your turn

Open a new Quarto: * Add some silly text, like ‘My First Quarto’, and * Copy the following code chunk, or create your own plot

library(tidyverse)

ggplot(cars) + 
  geom_point(aes(x = speed, y = dist))

Practice changing the code chunk options:

so that no warnings or messages appear
the plot appears but the code doesn’t
the code appears by the plot doesn’t

Scrollytelling

Scrollytelling

Scrollytelling is Scroll based storytelling.

Involves graphics that stick to the screen and and change as the user scrolls.
It’s one of the newer digital mediums.
Useful for creating a layered narrative.
Helps control the flow of information - great for cognitive load
Here is an example from ABC news explaining the progess of the Lismore Floods

Closeread

Closeread

Closeread is a Quarto extension developed by Andrew Bray and James Goldie for scrollytelling

Income inequality in Vienna link
Country Flags by Population link
Pension by Picture link

Two main pieces: Stickies

Closeread has two components: stickies and triggers.

Stickies

Stickies the things you want to stick on the screen (e.g. a plot)
We need to give them a reference ID (sort of like naming a variable)
The structure of the ID needs to start with a #cr- (e.g. #cr-plot, #cr-image)

Two main pieces: Triggers

Closeread has two components: stickies and triggers.

Triggers

Triggers are how you tell the Quarto when to make the stickies appear.
Use the ID of the sticky with an @ (Sort of like a citation)

Do It Yourself

Instructions

Step 1: Install the closeread extension. (sort of like a installing a package) See Getting Started
Step 2: Change the yaml header in your Quarto document to the closeread-html format
Step 3: Add sections to your document to say where to start and stop scrolling. Here is an easy example you can copy.

Live Demo time!

Your turn

Your turn

Follow the instructions to install the closeread extension See Getting Started
Copy the code for the basic example here and get it working
Take time to understand the different parts

Wrap Up

Summary

Discussed more on tailoring your messages for the medium
Revised best practice in slide design
Learnt how to create reproducible reports in Quarto
Discovered scrollytelling, and how we can create our own in Quarto

Answers

How Many Key Messages?

3 minutes 1 key message

Only enough time to make one clear point with a short example

10 minutes 1–3 key messages

Preferably 1 strong message with 2–3 supporting points

30 minutes 2–4 key messages

Enough time to explore each message with evidence and examples

60 minutes 4–6 key messages

Longer duration allows depth, not more messages
Avoid overloading—audiences retain only a few core ideas.

This advice will change a little with situation and context, but broadly will stay the same

Answers

To help people remember your messages

Repeat them — repeat the same message
Use simple wording — easier to remember
Show, don’t tell — use visuals to support your messages
Remove clutter — if it doesn’t support the message, cut it.
Signpost clearly — “Here’s the key takeaway…”
Give people a chance to catch up - Wrap up a section and let people re-engage
Summaries points at the end — close strongly and consistently.