I was recently out with some friends having drinks, and we started talking about PowerPoint slides (yes, we really are that nerdy). My friend told me about her colleague, Michael Alley, who argues that most of us are using PowerPoint incorrectly. His argument is that the Title/bullet point format that most of us use is mostly designed to help the speaker remember what to say, rather than to help the audience remember what was said. He proposes, instead, to use a technique he calls Assertion Evidence.

I’m in social science, and this technique was designed for physical science and engineering. I’ve spent some time poking around the website, and I definitely see the value in such a talk for science and engineering. I haven’t decided yet, though, how well it would translate to social science, or more specifically, the kind of social science I do. Much of the background I would present in a talk would be hard to present visually. The results could be visual, though more likely graphs than images. But at a general level, I like the perspective that we are all presenting with very similar techniques, and that we should consider whether our techniques are the best way to present.

We recently had a job candidate (and soon to be new colleague, Tim Brick) visit who presented using a different program (possibly Keynote? Unfortunately I’m not sure). It was refreshing to see something that was slightly different from exactly what we are used to seeing. One thing I really liked is that at the top of the presentation, he had a few simple words that outlined what he would be presenting. Honestly, I forgot the exact words, but if it was a talk I was giving, it might have broken down like this:

Overview            Theory                  Prevalence                         Predictors                           Outcomes           Done!

As he spoke, one of the words on top would be slightly brighter so as an audience member I had a sense of where he was in the talk. I liked it.

Then there are of course flashy ways to present, like Prezi. I made a Prezi once – it was a simple one, but it felt like it took me a lot more time than PowerPoint does. Perhaps that is only because I wasn’t used to it yet, though. There are lots of others; and lots of articles suggesting specific programs/websites.

What do you think of assertion evidence? How do you give presentations – standard in PowerPoint, or something different? Share your thoughts.                               

“The post Alternatives to standard PowerPoint presentations first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 23, 2014.”

For the proposal I recently submitted, I needed to paste a table I made in MS Word back into Word as an image, so that I could play with its size and have text wrap around it. My first attempt was to save it as a PDF, grab it, and paste it into Word, but it was too faded/blurry. My second attempt was to save it as a PDF, save it as a JPEG, and then paste it in, but even worse. Luckily, my husband knew the easier solution:

• Highlight the whole table in Word in a separate document.
• Copy it.
• Go into the document to the point you want to place it, and in Word choose “paste special” and then choose “picture (enhanced metafile)”
• Then you can adjust it as you wish            
  

•               Adjust size: Highlight it and change size physically, or highlight it, right click, choose size & position, and then change height/width under “scale.” I did the latter because I was pasting 3 different tables and I wanted them to be identical in size.
•             Wrap text: Right click, choose “wrap text” and then choose “in line with text” if you want text to wrap around the image (less white space on the page)

This process really helped me with the formatting of the proposal.

“The post MS Word trick #2: Pasting MS Word table into Word as image first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 12, 2014.”

I mentioned in a previous post that we had a grant writing marathon for 3 days in May. It was an excellent experience for me, in that my 3 students spent those 3 days basically supporting me in various grant related tasks. We had also scheduled a full week in June for paper writing. It turned out that I didn’t need to submit my proposal until late Tuesday of last week, so Monday and Tuesday were still grant writing for me (and a bit of support from my students), but otherwise, we all worked on various manuscripts (and 1 thesis). Here is the line up:

So we worked on 1 grant proposal, 1 thesis, and 8 manuscripts in various stages ranging from conceptualization, to responding to an R&R (note: fully drafted doesn’t mean it started from nothing!).

The end of the week tally was:
1 grant proposal: Submitted!
1 thesis: fully drafted and in my inbox
2 papers: analyses finalized and partially drafted
2 papers: revision & accompanying letter fully drafted and feedback given
3 papers: fully drafted & feedback given
1 paper: analyses run but more to go

If I hadn’t spent so much time on the grant proposal (both during our group time and late each night), I’m sure I could have accomplished more than I did on the paper I’m primary author on, though I did make some progress there. However, my biggest accomplishments of the week (other than, did I mention, the grant proposal?) was giving feedback to students and other co-authors on 4 papers, and meeting with students about other papers.

Overall we were generally happy with the week. It generated a fair bit of conversation in the department as people came by to see what we were up to. And we all agreed that when my lab space is next door to my office in our future building we are going to be more productive together (drop the lag time between sending emails and replying to them). The verdict was mixed on whether 5 days was the ideal – some people thought it was too long, and others liked it and were ready to schedule the next marathon. We may try for mini-marathons – either one day, or paper specific or both – in the next couple of summer months.

Couple of other observations – one of my students fashioned herself a standing desk and seemed to really like that. We had snacks every day and went out to lunch on Friday which helped morale, though morale likely would have been higher if, like Cindy Berg, we had a better setting than a window-less conference room.

But generally, we all really liked being near each other, and all engaged in the writing process. The collaboration was excellent, too, knowing we were involved in similar activities and able to check in with each other throughout the day.

Have you ever tried something similar? What worked about it and what would you change?

“Writing marathon first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 9, 2014.”