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• Tips for speaking in public
• How to reduce anxiety
• Resources (books and video courses)
• How to reference your presentation

Introduction

• A reader chooses when and where to focus attention; a speaker must focus a listener’s attention on what he or she is saying at this moment.
• A reader controls how fast he or she will move through a text; a speaker controls how fast listeners will move through an oral presentation.
• Readers have the option of going back and re-reading; listeners must grasp material as the speaker presents it.
• Readers have many graphic cues about order and importance of points and about the relationship among ideas; listeners rely on the speaker to be their guide and interpreter.

Image: Business vector created by rawpixel.com - www.freepik.com

Appeal to emotion

• Tell a story. Audiences respond better and be more convinced with stories that data.
• Use examples and anecdotes.
• Use surprises. This could be using a video when the audience thinks they are only getting slides.

What do you need to say?

The information for your presentation usually comes from a paper, case study, analysis, essay, or report. Choose only the key points from your paper. Go back to the question you were asked when you originally wrote your paper.

Design is key

Your presentation needs an introduction, body, and conclusion. Plan what your presentation will look like before you begin. Use only the important points from your paper to plan for sections of your presentation. These points then become the focus.

For each major section of your presentation, follow the 4 S Structure :

• Signpost the point (“First I’m going to point out the problem with...” “My second argument is that...” “It can be concluded that...”)
• State the point clearly and succinctly.
• Support the point with data, cases, description, relevant studies, etc.
• Summarize the point.

It is from these that you then design your slides and choose corresponding images and text.

10/20/30 rule

This rule states that a Power Point presentation should have no more than 10 slides, be 20 minutes long, and use no less than 30-point font.

This rule will keep the presentation on track so that you keep to time, as well as having a presentation that moves at a good pace and that is readable.

Do you need it?

• Use PowerPoint only if it will enhance audience attention, understanding, or retention.
• Be selective about what you put on slides. Don’t put the entire presentation on slides.
• Use visual and audio effects only if they serve your purpose and do not call attention to themselves. Make the technology serve the presentation. Don’t let it dominate.
• These are tools to help you tell your story. Don’t let the tools become the story.

Never read your presentation word for word. A good presentation is one where the presenter makes eye contact with his or her audience over the entire presentation. This means not reading your paper - your eyes are down, you lose your audience.

To help with this, make good notes, use cue cards, or put all notes on one sheet of paper. You can then glance at your notes for prompts. Better yet, learn and understand the material for your presentation, practice, and then use the images and text in your visual presentation as cues.

Tone and pacing

Avoid becoming monotone. Use variations in speed, inflections, and force to enhance your meaning and hold audience attention. Practice pronouncing words with which you are unfamiliar.

Some further points

Often times, a presenter does not notice their voice and body habits, which can be distracting when presenting. Remember, presenting is visual and oral story telling. With this in mind, understanding how a presentation looks and sounds is important. Keep these elements in mind:

Voice - “um,” “uh,” “okay”; everything sounding like a question (raising voice at the end of sentences); nervous laugh at the end of sentences; clearing the throat a lot, reading too quickly.

Body language - flipping hair back, playing with pen/pointer etc., rolling and unrolling notes, pushing sleeves up and down, playing with keys or coins in pockets, stepping back and forth/tapping foot, rocking body, touching face/adjusting glasses, turning rings on hand, waving hands around, tugging at shirt.

Visual aids - flipping overheads/slides too fast, talking to the screen.

Before you start!

Before you start working on your presentation:

• Check emails from your lecturer and the assignment question for how it should be presented,
• Check your learning materials and recommended reading on the course page,
• Read all instructions carefully - make sure you understand them and follow them exactly.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating an effective PowerPoint presentation:

• Remember to avoid too much text. You should keep your text brief and include talking points only. Detailed notes can be inserted into the notes section of PowerPoint, but only you should see those notes, unless a professor asks to see your notes to evaluate your PowerPoint as an assignment.
• Be consistent and clear with your font choices. Helvetica is a nice font for presentations. Make sure your font is large enough that an audience in a room would be able to see your text, even if audience members are sitting in the back of the room.
• Be careful with your color choices for text and background. You want to make sure your audience can read your text easily. Black on white text is easiest to read but is also boring for a presentation. Still, when you add color, just be sure you are adding color that works and doesn’t distract.
• Add images. Text on slides for every slide is boring. Add appropriate images to your slides. Relevant charts and graphs are excellent, as are pictures that will connect to your content.
• Make sure your main points are clear. Remember to connect your ideas well and provide background information and transitions when necessary.
• Keep your audience in mind. Your audience will affect the overall tone and appearance of your presentation. Sometimes, humor can be appropriate. Other times, a more serious tone may be necessary. Just as you evaluate your situation any time you write a paper, you should evaluate your situation for creating a PowerPoint presentation.

( Source: PowerPoints - Excelsior Online Writing Lab, licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License .)

5 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People from Weinschenk on Vimeo .

Wienot films. (2011, May 9). How to give an awesome (PowerPoint) presentation. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i68a6M5FFBc

• Present Your Data Like a Pro Harvard Business Review article by Joel Schwartzberg

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Content included in this guide is adapted from:

• Handout from  St Mary's University
• Tips for Presentations from COM Library Libguides
• Presentation Tips ( The DO-IT Center ) 
• Next: Tips for speaking in public >>
• Last Updated: Apr 11, 2024 10:12 AM
• URL: https://lit.libguides.com/presentations

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5 – Academic Discussions and Presentations

Picture this: you sit down on the first day of the semester listening to your professor talk about the required assignments on the syllabus. Your ears perk up suddenly when the professor mentions that not only is there a final paper but also a group presentation required in front of the class during the last week of the term. You hate public speaking and dread the moment when you will have to nervously stand at the front of the classroom giving a detailed account of your research. What will you say? How will you stay calm and collected up at the front of the room?

The above-mentioned scenario is very common. Inevitably, almost all writers have to participate in some form of class discussion or presentation during the course of their time in college. You may be one of the many students looking for advice on how to prepare for that end-of-term presentation. Fear not – read on for further advice about how to participate or lead in a class discussion or presentation.

Self-Reflection: Discussions and Presentations

Becoming a strong discussion leader or presenter requires practice. Complete the following self-reflection to see where your strengths and weaknesses may be in terms of public speaking. It is okay if you have limited experience in this area or are extremely terrified at first. The purpose of this chapter is to give readers like yourself the tools needed to be effective communicators!

• Have you ever presented or led a discussion in front of a class?
• If you responded yes to the previous question, what were your past experiences like? Did you feel confident in your presentation skills? What went well and what would you like to improve? Why?
• Think of one public speaker or presenter you know that inspires you. This could be a teacher, actor, social media influencer, or friend of yours. What do they do well when presenting? What would you like to emulate about them in your own presentations?
• What strengths do you have that friends, family members, or teachers have mentioned in the past? Think of one or two strengths. How could you incorporate these strengths into a presentation or public speaking skills?

Part 1: Presentation Preparation & Techniques

Any good presenter comes prepared to lead a presentation. It is important to know what you will say and how you will say it. Just like drafting a term paper, a speaker should also practice before giving the final presentation. Below are some simple steps taken from Zachary Shore’s Grad School Essentials: A Crash Course in Scholarly Skills to prepare students for academic presentations.

Outlining the Process

1. Main Point or Thesis

Before creating any outline or notes, be clear about what your main point or thesis will be. Are you presenting research conclusions? Your opinions? Comparing two items or ideas? Your main point is the central idea that the rest of the presentation should focus on. This could also be thought of as your central argument depending on the type of presentation. The main point should be able to be stated clearly and concisely. Use a single, meaningful sentence to convey this idea to the listeners.

2. Writing It Out

Once the main idea is clear, create an outline of any content you will include in the presentation. Think about any introduction, main points, and conclusion you may have during the presentation. Remember that you likely have a time limit to present. Keep this in mind when writing an outline. It is okay if you have too much content for now as you will practice your presentation next.

3. Practice by Yourself

Next, practice what you have written in your outline. The first time practicing is your opportunity to see if there is too much content or too little. When practicing, never read the outline word-for-word. This will make the presentation sound robotic and scripted. The audience will be able to tell if you are reciting from memory; scripted presentations are more often than not boring and do not sound authentic. An outline is meant to keep the presenter on track with the presentation and allow for unscripted natural interaction with the audience. Do practice saying the presentation out loud. It may be helpful to record yourself so that you can listen back to it later and make changes.

4. Practice with Others

After practicing on your own and making any necessary changes to the presentation, get some friends or mentors to listen to it. Ask the audience to take a few notes while presenting; this will allow them to give better feedback at the end. Areas you may ask them to think about are presentation skills and understanding of the content. For presentation skills, think about the volume of the speaker, clarity of speech, any non-verbal communication or gesturing, eye contact, and any audience interaction. If the listeners are familiar with the content or subject area of the presentation, they may also be able to give feedback on specific ideas or concepts you present.

5. Review Feedback & Repeat Process

Finally, review the verbal and written feedback from your sample audience. Before you do, though, take a deep breath and get ready for both positive feedback and constructive criticism. Critiques can be hard to take for anyone. Keep in mind that your audience of friends, peers, or instructors is only trying to help you grow as a presenter. The goal is to clearly and easily communicate your ideas to the intended audience. Think about how this can be done based on the feedback. Make any necessary revisions and repeat these five steps as needed.

Activity #1: Mini Presentation

Create a 5-minute presentation on a topic of your choosing; this may be a paper you wrote before or something of interest to you. Remember that 5 minutes is a short time. Give the audience the relevant information and follow the tips above. 

Presentation Techniques

No matter what sort of discussion or presentation you have in a course, the goal is to engage your audience and keep their attention. Think about any great teacher or presenter you have heard of before. How did they engage the audience with their words and actions? They probably followed some of the below advice.

Create an Engaging Hook 

Think about any good commercial or YouTube video. What do they do well? They are all good at grabbing the watcher’s attention within the first several seconds of the video. These videos do this by having a carefully crafted hook. You are a fisherman trying to reel in a fish. By having an appealing hook, the audience will bite the hook and want to hear more information. A poor hook will mean few if any bites by the fish (or in your case the audience!)

There are several ways to create an engaging hook. One is by using an impactful quote from someone respected, famous, or an expert on the topic. The audience will be familiar with this person or, if not, at least may understand that this is someone who knows something about the topic. Second, a story or analogy may make a great hook. This could be personal to you or a story about someone else that relates closely to the presentation. Keep it concise though. Another technique commonly used is to ask a question or series of a few questions to stimulate audience interest. Well-crafted or interesting questions will create a desire in the audience to find the answers. Another technique is to use shocking or strongly worded facts to draw interest. Something like, “9 out of 10 Americans admit they don’t floss their teeth every day, according to Dental Weekly,” may catch the listeners by surprise. Think about which hook approach is best suited for your topic. Be creative!

Engage the Audience

Allowing the audience to respond in some way during the presentation creates a more welcoming and lively presentation. Presenters who simply “lecture” through the material will find that they may start to lose the audience’s attention at a certain point, especially during longer presentations. A good presenter allows interaction at times by asking questions, providing audience members space to give answers or feedback, and even sometimes allowing audience members to participate in mini-group discussions or small activities when applicable.

This will vary according to your own comfort level, but humor creates interest and draws attention. Throwing in a joke or two during the presentation can make the difference between a presentation that seems boring and one that is lively and interesting. Feel free to make fun of yourself a little if you feel comfortable doing so. Sharing a short story can help to create humor as well. Just keep the humor relevant to the presentation topic and relatable to your target audience. Remember that it should also be appropriate for an academic audience! Humor can make a presentation more memorable and even fun for your audience members.

Activity #2: Presentation Introduction

Using the above tips, prepare a one-minute presentation introduction on a topic of your choosing. Use one of the techniques in the “Create an Engaging Hook” section to draw audience interest. Feel free to add audience interaction or use humor if you feel comfortable. Practice this with a partner or small group. 

Here is a video that you might find helpful:  https://youtu.be/vMSaFUrk-FA

Part 2: class discussions.

Purpose of Discussions

In most modern American university classrooms, discussion has become a key way in which instructors have students learn content and express opinions about the material. It is important to familiarize yourself with how a discussion works and its purpose. Participating in classroom discussions is essential in many courses. Be brave. Be bold. Be okay with making mistakes or being unsure how to answer. It is okay if you do not fully know how to express yourself or know the “right” answer. Hint: Often there isn’t just one right answer or way of responding in a discussion!

Activity #3: Small Group Discussion

Your instructor has told your small group of 3-4 students to discuss the appropriate tone for writing a persuasive essay you will write later in class. Respond to the following questions. Remember that any and all contributions count!

What is “tone” in writing? How might the tone of an academic persuasive essay be different from a fictional short story or a scientific research paper? How should facts and opinions be expressed in a persuasive essay? Are there any ways of writing that should be avoided?

Post Activity Check-in:

• Were students in your group (including yourself) able to easily respond to the questions or not? If not, what would help stimulate discussion in the future?
• What kinds of responses did group members give? Their own opinions? Questions? Responses in agreement or disagreement with others? Other types of responses?

One mistake students often make when thinking about discussions is that they must supply their own opinions or the “right” answer to the instructor. Most of the time this could not be further from the truth. Discussions are also a chance for students to express ideas, questions, and voice any doubts. Below are some ways to contribute to a discussion. It can be a lot easier than you might think.

• Ask a question: Are you uncertain about the material covered in a class? Do you have a question to clarify some of the content?
• Voice support or disagreement: Let the class know you agree or disagree with the previous speaker. Remember to state why and be polite.
• Add detail to a previous comment: Perhaps another student mentioned something that seemed important or you have more to share. Add on to this previous idea.
• Summarize a previous comment: Is there something you did not fully understand about the last speaker’s comment? Or maybe you want to make sure you fully understand. Phrase the comment in your own words to see if it makes sense.
• Contribute your own ideas and opinions: Was there something about the content covered in class that struck you? Is there an idea you want to emphasize or an opinion to share?

Activity #4: Small Group Discussion Leader

Now that you have experienced participating in a discussion, it is time to be the leader! Leading a discussion is different in some ways than only participating. You are not lecturing or teaching content like a teacher either. A good discussion leader is a facilitator. Remember that you are simply steering the discussion like the driver of a car. The discussion participants should be talking most of the time rather than the discussion leader.

There is a class debate. Have a group of 3-4 students discuss the following:

How should students use technology like mobile phones or laptops in a university classroom? Should instructors be strict with technology use or more relaxed? Why? What are the pros and cons of unrestricted technology use during class? How about the inverse?

Post-Activity Check-in:

• How was your experience being the discussion leader? What went well and what could be improved?
• Did students stay on topic? If not, how could you steer the discussion in the right direction?
• How much did you talk and how much did group members talk? Did anyone dominate the discussion? The key to a good discussion is giving everyone opportunities to contribute.

———————————————–

Shore, Z. (2016). Grad school essentials: A crash course in scholarly skills,  (pp. 78-96). University of California Press.

Critical Reading, Writing, and Thinking Copyright © 2022 by Zhenjie Weng, Josh Burlile, Karen Macbeth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Presenting in a Reading Group

Tips for giving a reading group talk

If you’re involved in research, you’re probably going to give a reading group presentation at some point. Many professors push their PhD students to give talks. Giving these talks helps researchers build the ability to read and understand papers quickly, and the ability to communicate findings effectively.

Volunteer or be volunTOLD. — Prof. David Fouhey

Dr. Fouhey told this joke multiple times during the computer vision reading group last semester and the other professors agreed. It succinctly summarizes the emphasis placed on giving these talks.

What’s a reading group?

Reading groups regularly meet to discuss topics in research. Most of the time, the group will focus on one specific paper detailing an important finding. In AI, many of these reading groups may be focused on award-winning papers from recent conferences or on methods relevant to the participants’ research.

Reading groups exist mainly to enrich the participants’ knowledge. Sometimes the talks will focus on a broader topic as an introduction and sometimes the talks will focus on a specific method in a specific paper. The more niche the audience of the reading group, the more advanced the topic tends to be. At MSAIL, we try to strike a balance between our younger, less-experienced audience (i.e. underclassmen) and our older, experienced audience (upperclassmen, graduate students, etc.).

Choosing a topic

Choosing a topic may be the hardest part of the presentation process. Generally, you can present any topic you want, given that it hasn’t already been presented recently. Present on something that grabs your interest immediately, or something you have some familiarity with - it’ll make the preparation process more bearable. If you’re open to topics and are confident you can adapt, then just go to a conference or journal page and search through some of the accepted papers that catch your eye (at the time of writing, I’ve been looking at ICLR 2021 papers).

In my opinion, the main question you should ask yourself when you’ve identified a potential topic is:

Am I willing to read about this topic in depth, even to the extent of falling into a rabbit hole?

You obviously don’t need to know everything about the topic you choose (no one does), but persistence is the key to having a strong presentation. The more comfy you are with the overall subject area, the more natural your presentation will flow and the less likely you are to trip up. (For MSAIL, however, if you’re a newcomer and haven’t really done a reading group presentation before, we’ll help you out!)

Here are some questions you should ask yourself when looking at a paper or topic that you’re about to choose:

• If it’s not clearly important or you don’t gain anything from knowledge of the topic itself, you’ll just be wasting time.
• Important for getting people to attend your talk, and also helpful in gauging whether your audience will stay engaged. If they aren’t engaged in the beginning how can they be expected to in the end?
• A “reasonable amount of time” is generally a week or so.
• You need to choose papers of reasonable length. We often suggest presenting on conference papers because they’re less than 10 pages on average. Longer papers and topics are more feasible down the line when you’ve become comfortable with these types of presentations.

For the examples in this post, I will go through the process of choosing a topic for one of my previous talks. I’ve given plenty of talks on uninteresting topics and papers, but some were received particularly well. I will talk about my process for presenting VideoBERT , which I presented way back in Fall 2019. This was actually my first ever MSAIL talk, and at the time I had only recently become acquainted with AI research. The talk had plenty of faults, which I’ll try to use as examples.

Reading relevant sources

For a specific paper.

Even if you choose one paper, that paper is probably not the only source you’re looking at to understand all the content. When you first read through the paper itself, you should annotate the key points (this is just a common reading skill, but it’s easy to forget!) and note the portions that confuse you. Depending on your background, you may or may not be able to finish the first pass. You should aim to have a big picture understanding of the paper, so maybe about 30%. If you can’t reach that level on your first read - don’t fret. You need to go read some supplementary materials. In particular, any decent paper will reference prior/related work in a section near the introduction - this is where you can dive into their citations and read up on the things that confuse you. Alternatively, I’ve found that Medium posts are particularly helpful as well for understanding more basic content.

Note the underlined portions here from the Related Work section of the VideoBERT paper. These highlight topics that might be worth searching up. You don’t need to dive into everything, but having a general understanding of what cross-modal learning and BERT are would help to better understand this paper.

If after all that, you still can’t understand 30% of the material in the paper, then I’m afraid you probably need to read further on basic material and possibly postpone your talk. I don’t expect this to happen because the pool of people who choose to present is self-selecting (as in, you’re more likely to want to present in a reading group if you already have basic background), but just in case, don’t be afraid to start at the beginning. I too have had to withdraw after signing up for a reading group before because I just did not understand what I was reading at all.

After the first pass, you have an idea of what the paper’s central ideas are. You can then start outlining what you want to talk about. Any subsequent passes will simply be to reinforce your understanding of the paper.

For a broader topic

For a broader topic, you should still choose to focus on a few papers in order to narrow the scope of your presentation. If you choose this, you likely have an idea in mind for how you wish to synthesize the ideas in the papers. Knowing this, you should focus your reading based on which points you hope to elucidate most. The process will very much feel like the process in the above section, except you’ll spend less time focusing on the intricate details of any one paper and you’ll focus more on the key ideas that you can use to build toward whatever main idea you’re focusing on.

In general, giving these types of talks is difficult. Even professors struggle to present so much content in a clear way. If you intend to give a talk like this, make sure to spend extra time in advance to really nail a cohesive argument. Otherwise, just stick to one paper since usually the time you have is only enough for one.

An example of a decent talk that synthesizes ideas in multiple papers is Justin Johnson’s lecture on Object Segmentation . This is obviously not a reading group talk and is an entire course lecture - but the principles are relatively similar since the topics presented here are from recent papers. Another good example is the talk Dr. Chai gave us in Fall 2020 .

Some of our own, more tame talks presenting multiple papers include John Day’s Brain-Inspired AI talk , Yash Gambhir’s Text Summarization talk , and my talk on using reinforcement learning for optimization in COVID-19 problems . If you watch them you’ll notice some of the difficulties we had with balancing our content and finishing in time.

Creating slides

Most of the time you’ll be preparing slides to assist you in your talk. Organizing your slides properly is the key to getting a good presentation going.

Something that helps me is using a general slide outline and then identifying where in the paper I can get the information for a specific section. Then I fill in the sections and occasionally add subsections based on the subtitles in the paper.

In general, you want to introduce the following points in any regular paper presentation. You can change the order to suit your preferred flow, but the one presented here works well normally. Note that you can use any number of slides for each section:

• Why did the authors explore this topic? Who and how does it help solve a big problem?
• What are the authors proposing or introducing?
• Make this clear at the beginning. Then your audience will know what to expect.
• What does your audience need to know (at a high level) before you dive into the details of the topic?
• This is not always necessary, but if you’re presenting something technically challenging you may want to briefly introduce this.
• This is the novel part of the paper. What did the authors do and how did they do it?
• How did they validate their methods and what did they compare it to? What are the deliverables?
• Restate the major contributions. Also, talk about the implications for the future.

General Principles

You’ve probably presented to someone before. In that case, you should be well aware of standard principles, but I’ll write some in case you aren’t:

• This is a technical talk. Please don’t make your readers lose you.
• Personally, I tend to put around 2 lines of text on a slide and then explain the rest verbally. Putting less text and explaining it instead helps me better understand the content too!
• I don’t need to tell you that a picture is worth a thousand words, but they’ll help a ton. You can usually just steal these from the paper and its supplementary materials. If they don’t have any and you feel that one would be appropriate, don’t be afraid to create one!
• Sometimes the talk is devoted to an equation or the theory you’re discussing is heavily reliant on equations (I can’t imagine some reinforcement learning papers without Bellman’s equation.). But if the paper has a lot of equations, try only to include the most important ones.

Take a look at my VideoBERT slides and note that I absolutely did not follow these principles and the above listed structure during that talk. I consider my VideoBERT talk to be of poor quality. Don’t worry about the technical content. (Note that this link is Michigan only)

Here are a few sample slides depicting how I would’ve roughly modified my VideoBERT talk to be easier to follow and listen to. I only wrote up to the methods section, because I just wanted to depict some of the principles in action. Again, don’t worry about the technical content. (This link is open to everyone)

Also, feel free to take a look at this slidedeck for general tips .

Presenting your slides

Presentation is very important for a technical talk. I’m pretty sure most presenters don’t want to bore their audience. During one reading group a while ago, I delivered a one hour talk that included even professors in the audience. After that talk I didn’t receive a single question. I can only speculate whether they got lost, whether we were out of time, or whether I just completely bored them. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen to you.

Here are some steps you can take to reduce the chance of losing your audience:

• Reiterating the importance of preparing your slides properly. Prepare them as if you were presenting them, and then practice presenting them at least once before your talk.
• This is a given - you should be speaking and never reading.
• Don’t go on diversions. Save them till the end.
• Leave room for questions during your presentation. I doubt most people will remember their questions by the end. A good rule might be to ask for questions every 5 minutes.
• Similarly, you should be gauging understanding as you go along. If the audience can attest to understand what you’re saying, you’re fine.
• Speak slowly. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have my entire audience understand 80% of my presentation and not finish within time than finishing and not having anyone understand anything. I sometimes break this rule without realizing.

There are probably many more principles to follow, but in reading groups these are the ones I’ve found to be the most blatant errors that I wish I corrected.

Can I forgo preparing slides?

If you don’t want to prepare slides, you can either:

• Walk through the paper itself
• Prepare questions and facilitate a discussion rather than giving a talk

I wouldn’t advise a newcomer (or anyone, for that matter) to choose the first option. The point of preparing slides is to make material more presentable and to help you, the presenter, understand the paper better. I’ve only experienced people presenting straight from the paper when they knew what they were talking about but had last minute obligations come up. For reference, the last two times I saw this done were from a student who wrote the paper he was presenting on, and from a senior research scientist at Google Brain. It is generally okay, however, to supplement your slides during your talk by briefly visiting the paper to discuss something like a figure or a table, or to answer questions.

The second option is far more feasible, and at MSAIL we actually recommend this format. Discussion questions help the audience engage with the material more. However, good discussions usually occur around people with background, so be wary of your audience. You’ll usually be presenting something in addition to the questions - for example, last Winter we had a discussion about using vision to analyze CT scans for the purpose of detecting COVID-19. All we did was play a video prepared by another organization and then discussed it in detail. This is perfectly fine, given that you have an interesting topic.

Going forward

Yeah, preparing to present at a reading group is a lot of work the first time around. After a while, you’ll be comfortable enough with both approaching novel technical content and with your presentation skills, so you’ll be able to take shortcuts and structure things as you wish. You’ll also just become faster. In the long term, this skill will certainly help you as a researcher.

Gone are the days when the MSAIL Admin team was scrambling to prepare entire talks within 5 hours on the day of (we were quite notorious for this during the ‘19-‘20 school year). This happened because we had very few speakers, but we’re much better off now. I hope you never prepare a talk within such a constraint because I can guarantee that the talk will fail miserably. The further along you go as a researcher, the later you’ll be able to start preparing reading group presentations, but you’ll still wish you started earlier.

If you’re ready to try your hand at a talk, sign up with your reading group(s). For University of Michigan students, here are some reading groups you might be interested in:

Reach out to us at [email protected] if you’re interested in giving a talk at MSAIL or for help with preparing a talk. Happy presenting!

Giving presentations

• Introduction

Thinking about your audience

Planning your presentation, notes, handouts and visual aids, good slide design.

• Delivering your presentation
• Poster presentations

Useful links for giving presentations

• Presentations (online) A Study Advice guide to giving online presentations
• Study Advice Helping students to achieve study success with guides, video tutorials, seminars and appointments.
• Presentation skills A Prezi on what to consider when planning and delivering a presentation from the University of East Anglia.
• Group work LibGuide Expert guidance on successful group work at university.
• Presentation skills for quivering wrecks by Bob Etherington Ebook (available to University of Reading members only). Aimed at business presenters, but good advice for all.

Good preparation is key to a good presentation. If you have considered your audience, know what messages you want to communicate, and have thought about the clearest way of communicating these messages, you can go into your presentation with confidence. Keeping things simple and not including too much in either your presentation itself, or your visual aids, means you will be able to pace your presentation well and your audience will appreciate the information you wish to communicate. The advice on this page shows you how to prepare a practically perfect presentation!  

• Who will be in the audience? Students, lecturers, fellow researchers, experts in the field, business people, general public, a mixture?
• Consider your purpose – to inform, show progress, persuade, sell, disseminate results, teach, or introduce a new idea?
• Will your presentation be an overview, basic introduction, develop an existing idea, go over old ground from a new perspective, summarise information, challenge beliefs, or show something new?

It is difficult to take in a lot of detailed information when listening. Therefore, it is very important that your presentation has a clear structure so your audience can follow it.

In a 10-15 min presentation you will only have time to make 3 or 4 main points. You will have more impact if your points are clear, simple, relevant, and direct.

Beginning : Introduce yourself. Outline the aims of your talk and what you will cover in the presentation. Start with an attention grabber, such as a picture, an everyday example, or a rhetorical question.

Middle : Your points should lead logically from each other. What does the audience need to know first in order to understand your subject? Then what do they need to know? What evidence will you use to support these points and convince the audience? Have clear sections or headings to structure the middle section and lead from one point to another.

End : Avoid introducing new information at this point. Summarise the main things you want the audience to remember. End positively with a strong concluding sentence, not an apology. Leave time for questions. If you are presenting to an external audience, have your contact details available for people.

When preparing your material, think about what you will be comfortable saying – don't include anything that you aren't happy with or don't have confidence in. Do your research and check your facts so that you can feel secure in your knowledge. Steer clear of jokes and humour if it doesn't come naturally to you.

Planning a group presentation can take longer than you think, as you have to arrange times to meet and coordinate everyone's contributions. Use the links below to help you work out what you need to do to make your group presentation succeed.

• Group work LibGuide Expert guidance for successful group work at university.

Many people are tempted to write their presentation out fully and read it aloud, but this isn't enjoyable for the speaker or the audience; it is hard to get vocal expression and connection with the audience when reading aloud, and a written script is often more stilted and formal than natural speech. A better idea is to speak normally and use notes  to guide you.

• It may be better to use a few file cards for your notes rather than a sheet of A4 paper – less flimsy and less tempting to hide behind!
• Use headings and key words to remind you of the main points and their order
• Less is more – you want to be able to read them quickly at a glance
• If you are using visual aids, note cues showing when you want to change slide
• You can write reminders to yourself – like "slow down" if you tend to talk fast
• Note down things you definitely don't want to get wrong: names, dates, statistics
• Number your cards in case they get mixed up or dropped.

If you have been asked to prepare a  handout , don't try to include too much information or your audience will spend more time reading it than listening to you. Include:

• a brief outline of your talk
• a summary of data
• references and further reading on your topic
• contact details 

There are also various  visual aids  you may use. The most commonly used include PowerPoint slides, Prezi, video clips and posters. You might also use a flipchart or whiteboard, or have some physical materials you want to show.

If you use visual aids, keep them simple and make sure that they support and add emphasis to your argument – not distract the audience from what you are saying. Whatever you use, make sure you know how to find and use any necessary technology or equipment.

Visual aids can give you confidence, help you to remember the structure of your talk and ensure that the audience does not look at you all the time. They should enhance and illustrate what you say, making it easier for the audience to understand and remember. They are not supposed to dominate or distract from your talk.

Here are some common options and issues you may need to consider:

PowerPoint slides

These are common and easy to use, but may take a few minutes to set up, so plan this into your timing. Ensure you have a backup plan in case the technology doesn't work on the day, such as having the slides on a memory stick as well as on the network drive, or having handouts of the slides to give out. Check you know how to change between slides using the mouse or a remote control. Beware of sound effects on animations!

Prezi (link below) is a non-linear alternative to PowerPoint. It provides templates that are often similar to mind-maps, and you are able to zoom in and out, and navigate round them in different ways. Be careful not to overdo the zooming and movement as it can be very disorientating for the audience. It is easy to get carried away with exploring the features of Prezi, meaning it can take far longer to prepare your presentation. However, if used well, Prezi can be a powerful presentation tool. Be aware that the free version of the software provides access to your presentations online, so there needs to be a reliable internet connection in the presentation venue.  

Video clips

It can be effective to break a presentation up with a short video clip to illustrate a key point. There are many educational videos available on YouTube and via TED Talks (link below). However, make sure any videos are professional, appropriate, and relevant. Always ask yourself why you are using it and if you haven't got a good reason, leave it out. Check the sound, projection, and internet facilities in the presentation venue beforehand, and have an alternative plan in case the video won't play on the day.

Flip charts / white board

These are more suitable for small group discussions, as they simply can't be seen at the back of a large hall. Make sure you have non-permanent pens to write on the whiteboard. Also practice writing in large, clear letters so that it is easy to see.

Handouts can mean the audience doesn't have to copy down all the slides - but they can also be distracting, as people read them instead of listening. If you are presenting to a large audience (for instance at a conference) it can be expensive to provide handouts. Consider whether they can be sent via email or put on a website instead. If you're going to share them (or PowerPoint slides) electronically, it may be better to save them as PDFs.

Showing an object may be useful as a focus for discussion with a small group. It will work better as a replacement for part of your discussion (e.g. leave out some explanation) rather than reinforcing your message.

• Prezi Presentation software.
• TED talks Inspiring short educational talks.

Keep your slides simple, uncluttered, and easy to read. Just because you can have music, moving graphics, and bullet points whizzing in and out doesn't mean you have to! But if you're confident about your technical ability, some simple animation can be very effective.

30pt font and above is best for large audiences. Avoid distracting backgrounds, and keep lots of white space between lines/sections. Choose a writing colour that shows up clearly on the background (avoid green & red), and for a professional presentation, stick to simple fonts and avoid cartoons. Keep unnecessary punctuation to a minimum. If you're going to use images, make sure they are there for a reason - to illustrate your point or make it memorable.

For sources of copyright-cleared images, see the Library's list of image databases (link below).

It's a good idea to include a slide at the beginning of your presentation with your name and title, and follow this with a slide outlining your talk. End with a slide giving your contact details.

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How to Give a Killer Presentation

• Chris Anderson

For more than 30 years, the TED conference series has presented enlightening talks that people enjoy watching. In this article, Anderson, TED’s curator, shares five keys to great presentations:

• Frame your story (figure out where to start and where to end).
• Plan your delivery (decide whether to memorize your speech word for word or develop bullet points and then rehearse it—over and over).
• Work on stage presence (but remember that your story matters more than how you stand or whether you’re visibly nervous).
• Plan the multimedia (whatever you do, don’t read from PowerPoint slides).
• Put it together (play to your strengths and be authentic).

According to Anderson, presentations rise or fall on the quality of the idea, the narrative, and the passion of the speaker. It’s about substance—not style. In fact, it’s fairly easy to “coach out” the problems in a talk, but there’s no way to “coach in” the basic story—the presenter has to have the raw material. So if your thinking is not there yet, he advises, decline that invitation to speak. Instead, keep working until you have an idea that’s worth sharing.

Lessons from TED

A little more than a year ago, on a trip to Nairobi, Kenya, some colleagues and I met a 12-year-old Masai boy named Richard Turere, who told us a fascinating story. His family raises livestock on the edge of a vast national park, and one of the biggest challenges is protecting the animals from lions—especially at night. Richard had noticed that placing lamps in a field didn’t deter lion attacks, but when he walked the field with a torch, the lions stayed away. From a young age, he’d been interested in electronics, teaching himself by, for example, taking apart his parents’ radio. He used that experience to devise a system of lights that would turn on and off in sequence—using solar panels, a car battery, and a motorcycle indicator box—and thereby create a sense of movement that he hoped would scare off the lions. He installed the lights, and the lions stopped attacking. Soon villages elsewhere in Kenya began installing Richard’s “lion lights.”

• CA Chris Anderson is the curator of TED.

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Reading Comprehension Strategies PowerPoint - Visualising

Updated:  28 Feb 2020

A 12 slide editable PowerPoint template explaining the reading comprehension strategy of visualising.

Editable:  PowerPoint

Non-Editable:  PDF

Pages:  12 Pages

• Curriculum Curriculum:  AUS V9, AUS V8, NSW, VIC

Years:  4 - 6

• Adobe Reader (pdf) Sign up to Plus
• Microsoft PowerPoint (potx) Sign up to Plus

Use this teaching presentation to explicitly introduce your students to the  reading comprehension strategy of visualising .

This PowerPoint includes the following content:

• a definition of the strategy
• an explanation of how and when to use the strategy
• examples of metacognitive questions to ask when applying the strategy
• a guided, whole-class activity (based on a literary text)
• an activity for the students to complete independently.

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Teaching reading

Mar 25, 2019

1.55k likes | 4.3k Views

Teaching reading. Teaching objectives. Through learning this section, Ss will be able to: understand the nature of reading know the factors affecting reading comprehension know the skills involved in reading comprehension know the models and principles for teaching reading

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Presentation Transcript

Teaching objectives Through learning this section, Ss will be able to: • understand the nature of reading • know the factors affecting reading comprehension • know the skills involved in reading comprehension • know the models and principles for teaching reading • know the reading strategies Ss can use in different stages of the reading lesson • understand the procedures and types of activities we use in teaching reading • design a sample lesson plan for a reading lesson

Teaching content/procedure • Revision • What is reading • Models for teaching • Principles for teaching reading • Stages in teaching reading • Reading strategies • Assignment

Revision (game) Noughts (o) and crosses (x)

Answer the following questions:

Q1:What is schema? What’sits implication for teaching listening?BACK

Q2:What are the factors that affect listening comprehension?Name two of them.BACK

Q3:What are the difficulties the Chinese students may experience? List two of them.BACK

Q4:What listening strategies can students employ in the while-listening process? Name three.BACK

Q5:The bottom-up model starts with the listeners’ world knowledge and life experience. (True or false?)BACK

Q6:How many stages are there in the teaching listening?What are they?BACK

Q7:Name four tasks of the while-listening stage.BACK

Q8:What are the purposes of while-listening stage?BACK

Q9:What are the purposes of post-listening stage?BACK

What is reading? • Why do people read? --To get information --For pleasure or interest • What do people read? --Newspapers, magazines, diagrams, maps, letters, manuals, instructions, advertisements, etc. --Novels, plays, poems, lyrics, etc.

What is reading? • How do people read? --Skimming: read quickly to get the gist --Scanning: read to locate specific information --Intensive reading --Extensive reading

What is reading? • Factors affecting reading comprehension Discuss in groups the factors that affect reading comprehension & and the characteristics of a good reader.

What is reading? • Factors affecting reading comprehension --Word recognition --Language competence --Experience --Interest/Motivation --Individual cognitive

What is reading? • Characteristics of a good reader --have a clear purpose in reading --read silently --read phrase by phrase, rather than word by word --concentrate on important information --use different speeds and strategies for different reading tasks

What is reading? • Characteristics of a good reader --make prediction --guess the meaning of new words from context, or ignore them --make use of background information to help understand the text

What is reading? • Skills involved in reading comprehension --Understanding the explicitly stated information --understanding conceptual meaning --deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items --understanding relations within sentences --understanding relations between sentences

What is reading? • Skills involved in reading comprehension --predicting --identifying main idea --recognizing patterns of organization --recognizing indicators in discourse --recognizing the organization of the text --guessing meaning of new words --skimming --scanning

What is reading? • Skills involved in reading comprehension --understanding references --questioning --paraphrasing --making inferences --drawing conclusions --sequencing

Models for reading • The bottom-up model (data-driven) (Reading is a decoding process) Comprehension Sentences Phrases Words Letters

Models for reading • The top-down model (concept/reader-driven) Reading begins with reader background knowledge (Goodman: Reading is a psychological guessing game)

Models for reading • The interactive model (the schema theory model) Reader background knowledge Individual letters and sounds comprehension

The schema theory --Linguistic schema: language --Content schema: topics, themes --Formal schema: style e.g. --Mary heard the ice cream man coming down the street. She remembered her birthday money and rushed into the house… --buying stamps --going to a restaurant

Discussion and reflection Which model do you think we should adopt in teaching reading?

Principles for teaching reading • Arouse Ss’ interest by linking topic to their experience and existing knowledge • Exploit the reader’s background knowledge • Build a strong vocabulary base • Expose students to different types of reading: intensive/extensive; skimming/scanning • Teach reading strategies: predicting, skimming, scanning, inferring, guessing meaning from the context, summarizing, etc. • Integrate reading with other skills, e.g. speaking, writing.

Stages in teaching reading • Pre-reading stage • While-reading stage • Post-reading stage

Pre-reading stage Purpose --activate Ss’ schemata --arouse Ss’ interest --clear linguistic obstacles( e.g. vocabulary)

Pre-reading stage Activities --predicting --setting the scene --brainstorming --pre-teaching vocabulary

While-reading stage Purpose --Checking comprehension --training reading skills and strategies

While-reading stage Activities: A. Skimming or scanning stage --getting the main idea --identifying topic sentences and main idea --matching subtitles with passages or paragraphs --creating titles or headlines fro passages --filling in forms with key concepts

While-reading stage Activities: B. Decoding or intensive reading stage --comprehension questions intended to develop reading skills --language activities to focus on vocabulary and structures

While-reading stage Activities: C. Comprehension stage (T/F, Wh-, Multiple choice) Three-level comprehension

Level 1: literal comprehension/reading the lines e.g. Decide which statements express what the author says. A terrible earthquake shook San Francisco on April 18th, 1906. A large number of people died in 1906 earthquake. The 1989 earthquake did not happen in the center of town.

Level 2: interactive comprehension/reading between lines --re-arrange the ideas or topics discussed in the text. --explain the author’s purpose of writing the text --summarize the main idea when it is not explicitly stated in the text --select conclusions which can be deduced from the text e.g. Decide which statement imply the author’s ideas. A. Many people became homeless because of the 1906 earthquake. B. San Francisco is a place where earthquakes are likely to happen. C. many buildings in San Francisco were too old to stand the 1989 earthquake.

Level 3: critical comprehension/reading beyond lines e.g. Decide which statement imply the author’s ideas. A. Nature can be very harmful to mankind in may ways. B. Mankind should and can think of different ways to prevent harms from nature. C. With the development of science and technology, mankind can discover more about nature.

Information transfer activities --Pictures --Drawings --Maps --Tables --Tree diagrams --Cyclic diagrams --Pie charts --Bar charts --Flowcharts --Chronological sequence --Subtitles (providing subtitles) --Notes (taking notes while reading)

Post-reading stage Purpose: --Expansion --integrating skills

Post-reading stage Activities: --discussion --role-play --gap-filling --retelling --summarizing --writing (e.g. comment, imaginative ending to the story, instructions, travel brochure…)

Reading strategies Brainstorming In groups of 4, list 5-8 reading strategies you use most frequently.(5 mins.)

Classifying In groups, categorize the strategies according to the three stages of reading. • Pre-reading strategies • While-reading strategies • Post-reading strategies

Feedback • Pre-reading strategies • While-reading strategies • Post-reading strategies

Pre-reading strategies • Develop a positive attitude toward reading • Advanced preparation (previewing the reading materials) • Predicting (content, vocabulary…) • Structured overview • Question • Brainstorming (Structured overview) • Relating new knowledge to prior knowledge

While-reading strategies • Identify important ideas • Identify the organizational pattern of the text • Identify indicators in discourse • Identify sequence of events • Note-taking • Skimming • Scanning • Draw inferences • Make use of logic/common sense • Deduce the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items • Skipping unknown/unimportant words • Imagery • Monitor understanding

Post-reading strategies • Grouping • Summarize • Paraphrase • Reread • Question (ask for clarification) • Cooperation • Self-evaluation

Analysis (Junior middle school) Watch the video “Training in Brazil”, put down the teaching procedure and answer the following questions: What types of reading are involved in the lesson? What skills or sub-skills are covered in the lesson? Is the design of the reading activities reasonable?

Analysis What types of reading are involved in the lesson? reading silently/reading aloud 2) What skills or sub-skills are covered in the lesson? skimming, scanning, note-taking…

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• Skip to main content

10 Simple Ways to Make Your Speech Easy to Read (for Presenting AND Practicing!)!

by Jezra on September 18, 2017

If You’re Reading Your Speech, Make that Easy!

• Because you’re practicing   a talk , and because
• You’ve got better things to do with your time than memorize a speech that you’ll only give once!

I make that argument in Public Speaking Tip 51: I f You’re Reading from Notes When You Deliver a Speech, Read with Pride; Don’t Hide! . The post is one of my 100 Top Public Speaking Tips , and it’s worth checking out (along with the other 99).

But if you already  know  that you’re going to be reading your speech from notes—either for practice, or at the podium—you don’t need to be persuaded.

Instead, use these proven formatting tips to make your script easy to read.

How to Make a Script Easy to Read (from the Stage or in Your Living Room)

Reading your speech shouldn’t be a struggle, and it shouldn’t require concentration.

These tips will help you  glance at the page  in your hands, see what’s there, and share it with your audience.

Doesn’t that sound better than struggling with your text?

1. Use a LARGE font (14 pt. minimum; 15 pt. minimum if you’re older or have weak eyesight)

2. Leave LOTS of white space on your page (the more words are crammed onto each page of your script, the more trouble you’ll have keeping your place).

3. Make each paragraph SHORT—ideally, just one sentence long—so you’re not tempted to race through it. Putting each new thought on its own line encourages you to slow down and think about one idea at a time, rather than speeding up to get through a paragraph of text.

4. Leave a blank line between statements  (again, so that you can easily see where you are in the script).

5. Make each PAGE short. Before printing, set your bottom margin to 5″ or more , so that you’re only reading from the top half or third of each page. This is particularly helpful if you’re reading your script in a virtual presentation; you won’t have to look too far down to read everything on a page, so you can maintain better eye contact with your camera (i.e., your audience).

6. Number your pages with large numbers (I use a 24-pt font). If you drop your script, you can put the pages back in order without effort.

7. Don’t staple pages together, and don’t print two-sided ; those things make your script very hard to handle.

8. Use a yellow highlighter to highlight words or phrases you want to be SURE you don’t miss.

9. Look at the end of every script page. If the point you’re discussing continues onto the next page, put a large star in the lower right-hand corner (I use a purple felt-tipped pen for this). This mark reminds you to  not let your energy down   when you reach the bottom of the page, but rather to stay focused and continue your discussion, as if there was no page break in the middle of your point.

And most of all,

10. When you’re reading from a script,  hold it in front of you , just below the level where it’s obvious to your audience (it’s OK if they see a little white, but you don’t want your script to block your face).

Why Not Just Use Bullet Points?

Unless you’re an expert presenter, or very familiar with your speech (meaning, you’ve  practiced it a lot!! ), bullet points can be the worst of both worlds , giving you either too much information or not enough:

• Very terse (short, abbreviated) bullet points mean that you have to figure out exactly what to say. This is not the right use of your energy! (The right use of your energy is connecting with your audience .)
• “Bullet points” that are actually full sentences send a mixed message: Are you supposed to be reading your speech (the full sentences), or improvising (the bullet points)?

There is  a legitimate use for bullet points in a speech for which you don’t need full scripting — and that’s to remind you of what topics you want to cover , in what order. Here’s an example:

*subway story *key message must get you closer to your goal *ask for raise *visit my store *just want you to know *key message must get you closer to your goal *resolve subway story

I know what this means, so I could speak to it at length without any more information. But if you need more than a few bullets to give your talk, at least part of your script should probably be written out and formatted for easy reading .

Do PowerPoint “Presenter Notes” Make Reading Your Speech Easier?

No, they do the opposite.

Presenter notes:

• Keep you tied to your computer during a presentation (with paper in hand, you can walk and talk);
• Have to be scrolled, which is an awkward thing to do while you’re speaking; and
• Only show you  a single slide’s worth  of scripting at a time, so you never know what’s coming next.

Fortunately, these are easy problems to solve.

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All Articles Education Insights The science of reading: A formula to great literary instruction

The science of reading: A formula to great literary instruction

Explicit reading instruction using the science of reading can make an enormous difference in students' ability to read, Kymyona Burk writes.

By Kymyona Burk 08/07/24

Education Insights

(SDI Productions/Getty Image)

For most Americans, learning to read is a fundamental part of early childhood. Whether it was our parents reading to us at night or early school lessons full of colorful and rhyming stories, reading is a part of the beautiful and complicated puzzle that makes us who we are. 

Our brains have been trained for years to take in the information that we see and turn it into something we understand. For students, the most crucial period for this training takes place between kindergarten and third grade. During those years, students slowly transition from learning to read to reading to learn. By fourth grade, most curriculum is being taught through reading. 

The way we teach early literacy plays a huge role in a student’s ability to successfully read by the crucial fourth-grade checkpoint. 

Flawed instruction can lead to reading failures

America is facing a reading crisis. According to NAEP , only 33% of fourth-grade students in the U.S. are reaching grade-level proficiency in reading.

This number is so low partly because schools have been using harmful reading practices such as three-cueing. This flawed instruction model teaches students to read based on meaning, structure and visual cues, redirecting the student from the word itself. Essentially, students are taught to guess a word based on a picture instead of sounding out the word. 

Eight states banned three-cueing in 2023. 

So, what is the right way to teach students to read? ExcelinEd is one of many education-focused entities that embrace and promote the research and evidence-based practice known as the science of reading.

To ensure every child can read by third grade, all educators must be trained in the science of reading, an evidence-based approach that teaches phonemic awareness, phonics/decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This is the opposite of the three-cueing system. 

Science of reading is the best way forward

The science of reading is a culmination of research that incorporates information learned through studies of developmental psychology, educational psychology, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.

For example, neuroscientists using functional MRI scans showed the section of the brain dealing with language was significantly more active in young students learning to read through a phonetic-based curriculum than in kids who were taught by three-cueing methods. 

While the science of reading is based on phonetic learning, other skills such as oral language, alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness and vocabulary development are critical to becoming a skilled reader.  

Researchers have been able to determine the brain’s path to reading comprehension and the type of explicit instruction that is needed for students who may have difficulty learning to read.

This style of reading instruction is working for students across the country. A  2023 study on select California schools found improvements in reading proficiency using evidence-based approaches.  California doesn’t mandate science of reading instruction, so the study focused on 76 of the state’s lowest-performing schools. Researchers found the science of reading approach raised test scores in English and math for third-graders in 2022 and 2023. The increase in comprehension was the equivalent of attending an additional quarter of a school year compared to other students who did not use evidence-based instruction. 

As of April 2024, 38 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction. For the majority of those states, that includes training teachers in how to better implement science of reading instruction.

For example, California has adopted 10 of 18 recommended early literacy policy fundamental principles, one of 12 states operating without requiring teachers to learn how to teach using the science of reading.  

Science of reading can make a difference

I’ve seen the change that teaching with explicit instruction and scientifically based methods can make in a state. 

From 2013 to 2019, I was the state literacy director for the Mississippi Department of Education. In 2013, the state ranked last in the nation in fourth-grade reading, according to NAEP. We set out to change that.

With courageous leadership from then-state Superintendent Carey Wright, Ed.D., (now state superintendent for Maryland) and policy know-how from state officials, we were able to implement the Literacy-Based Promotion Act to mandate research-based literary instruction and better professional learning opportunities for Mississippi teachers. 

As of 2023, Mississippi ranks 21st   in the nation for fourth-grade reading. Some call this change the Mississippi Miracle . It’s not a miracle . It’s proof that scientifically research-based instruction works.   

Evidence-based literary instruction is the key to solving our nation’s reading crisis. Working together, as other states have done over the past two decades, we can bring more science of reading methods to our classrooms to ensure our youngest readers have a strong foundation to build on as they move through and beyond school.   

Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own. 

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With PowerPoint presentations, it's usually you, or an audio or video clip, doing all the talking. But what if you want to give your voice a much-needed break without interrupting the presentation?

Microsoft PowerPoint has a built-in but hidden Speak feature that allows it to read out the text of your presentation slides, similar to the Read Aloud feature in its cousins—Word and Outlook.

In this article, you'll learn how to set up and use the Speak feature in Microsoft PowerPoint to read out your slides and power up your presentations, plus how to manage it.

How to Enable Speak in Microsoft PowerPoint

The Speak feature has been available in PowerPoint since PowerPoint 2010, but not many are aware of this because it's neither on the Ribbon area nor on the Quick Access Toolbar by default.

With a little tweaking, however, you can enable Speak on the Ribbon and QAT, and get PowerPoint talking just like your Google Assistant . Here's how:

• Open the PowerPoint desktop application.

• Drag the scroll bar, scroll all the way down and click on Speak . The commands are arranged alphabetically, so you can jump to “S.”

• Speak will be enabled for all documents in PowerPoint by default.
• Return to your Quick Access Toolbar , and you should see the Speak button, but it may be inactive.

Related: How to Read Text Out Loud on Android: Methods You Can Use

How to Use Speak to Read Microsoft PowerPoint Documents Aloud

Once Speak is added to your Quick Access Toolbar or Ribbon, you can start listening to your PowerPoint presentations. Here's how:

• Launch the PowerPoint desktop application and open any existing document.

• Click on Speak and it will start speaking or reading out the selected text.

You'll notice that unlike the Read Aloud feature, Speak functions basically as a play/stop button on the Quick Access Toolbar. It can also be playing in the background while you do other tasks.

Related: Everything You Need to Know About TikTok's Text-to-Speech Feature

How to Manage Speak in Microsoft PowerPoint

If you want to manage how Speak works, you'll have to go through the Windows menu. Here's how:

• Press the Windows key on your PC and click on Control Panel .

• Click on the Voice selection dropdown to select a different voice. Your options will depend on your version of Windows.

• Voice Speed is set to Normal by default. You can adjust this by dragging the slider left or right between “Slow” and “Fast.”
• Click OK when done.

Related: How to Set Up and Manage the Read Aloud Feature in Microsoft Word

Power Up Your PowerPoint Presentations With Speak

Whether you're feeling tired and exhausted or you have a speech impairment, you can power up your PowerPoint presentations with Speak and let it do the talking on your behalf. It's also available in Word, Outlook, and OneNote.

Speak is clearly not as robust or as accessible as Read Aloud, perhaps due to the fact that PowerPoint already has several other built-in audio/visual tools. However, it is good enough to do the basic tasks of helping you make an audio presentation or read another's presentation aloud.

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How a Podcast Toppled the Reading Instruction Canon

Journalist Emily Hanford, creator of the hit podcast ‘Sold a Story,’ on the national reckoning around how we teach kids to read in schools—and where we’re still getting it wrong.

Eight years ago, journalist Emily Hanford met a college student with dyslexia who could barely read. “She described to me how she got through text—without really being able to read very well at all,” Hanford recalls. “This woman was clearly bright. How did this happen?”

Her curiosity piqued, Hanford, a senior correspondent and producer at American Public Media (APM) Reports, dug into the research on reading and reading disabilities and produced podcast episodes such as “ Hard Words ” in 2018 and “ What the Words Say ” in 2020. The shows garnered moderate interest. 

Then came “ Sold a Story ,” Hanford’s 2022 blockbuster podcast episode examining how disproven ideas about reading had made their way into the country’s most popular reading curricula, downloaded more than 3.5 million times last year. “‘Sold a Story’ really hit a new audience. It reached the general public,” Hanford says. “I’ve gotten notes from people who say, ‘I’m not in education, I’m not a teacher, I don’t even have kids. But I found this really interesting.’”

Hanford’s reporting tapped into decades of research in cognitive science, educational psychology, and neuroscience about how the brain learns to read—a body of evidence often referred to as “the science of reading”—and made the case that many schools used debunked strategies to teach the skill. Fluent readers, research shows , must develop a deep understanding of phonics, allowing them to sound out and make sense of words—something that children must be explicitly taught. Many schools, Hanford’s reporting revealed, were using programs that weren’t aligned with the research and relied on methods like teaching kids to look for “context cues” to help guess words, instead of sounding them out phonetically. 

In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a long-standing battle over the best way to teach young children how to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. “Teachers don’t actually need someone to connect the dots; many just needed someone to explain to them some basic things about how people learn to read, and then they said, ‘Oh my God, why have I been doing it this other way?’”

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have passed laws pertaining to teaching children how to read according to the science of reading since 2019—and about 15, according to Hanford’s count, are directly in response to her reporting. In 2022, Lucy Calkins, creator of the Units of Study reading curriculum investigated in “Sold a Story” and used by nearly a quarter of all U.S. elementary schools , revised her curricula to include more phonics. Meanwhile, sales at Heinemann, one of the biggest publishers of reading curricula, including Fountas & Pinnell, declined 75 percent in 2023, according to APM Reports , as schools have opted to invest in more evidence-aligned approaches.

We spoke with Hanford about the tectonic shifts created by “Sold a Story,” her take on the criticism of her work, and what she thinks lies ahead after the dust settles. 

HOLLY KORBEY: Your thesis that students are being taught to read using disproven methods hit a nerve—“Sold a Story” has been downloaded millions of times. What are some of the measurable, concrete outcomes in response to the podcast that you’ve been able to track? 

EMILY HANFORD: The outcomes that mean the most to me are the thousands of emails and social media posts I got from teachers—overwhelmingly, these have been positive. Not positive like “We’re so happy about this.” It’s more like “Oh, wow, this is really important stuff that I needed to know. Thank you for putting this out there.” Those notes are often full of emotion, but many are also characterized with “We can do this, I’m psyched. I want to learn more about this.”

At our last count, about 15 pieces of legislation had actually passed. I have mixed feelings about the legislation; obviously, it’s a way to show the impact of journalism, and I hear from teachers that legislative changes are needed, so there’s a role for policy here. 

But one of the problems with policies is they have lots of different impacts. For example, they make it possible to galvanize a certain kind of resistance; they give critics something to shoot at. I don’t disagree with some of the points being made, like the criticism of bans on three-cueing. I think policies like the three-cueing bans give detractors an opening to say, “All of this science of reading stuff, we just need to move on.” And I think that’s disingenuous at best.

KORBEY : What do you wish people would focus on? What do you think the important takeaway is from “Sold a Story”?

HANFORD : “Sold a Story” took on one really small question about reading: the idea that kids don’t have to be taught how to sound out words. They can , but they don’t have to , because they have all these other strategies they can use to figure out the words. If you look at what it takes for kids to read, decoding is just one little part. The podcast took on that one small idea because I think it’s at the foundation of the problem we are having with how we teach reading. 

I try very hard to stay in my lane. I’m a journalist, I’m not an advocate or a policy expert. But one of the things I think a lot about are three-cueing bans , for example. I think cueing bans partly exist because people got a message—one I wanted them to get from “Sold a Story”—that you have to take some stuff away. Improving reading instruction isn’t just about adding phonics, it’s about taking something away. Whether or not it’s right to do that through a ban, I don’t know. 

.css-1ynlp5m{position:relative;width:100%;height:56px;margin-bottom:30px;content:'';} .css-2tyqqs *{display:inline-block;font-family:museoSlab-500,'Arial Narrow','Arial','Helvetica','sans-serif';font-size:24px;font-weight:500;line-height:34px;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.8px;-moz-letter-spacing:0.8px;-ms-letter-spacing:0.8px;letter-spacing:0.8px;}.css-2tyqqs *{display:inline-block;font-family:museoSlab-500,'Arial Narrow','Arial','Helvetica','sans-serif';font-size:24px;font-weight:500;line-height:34px;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.8px;-moz-letter-spacing:0.8px;-ms-letter-spacing:0.8px;letter-spacing:0.8px;} Teachers deserve and need good materials. But you can also teach kids to read with a whiteboard and some books and a marker. .css-1ycc0ui{display:inline-block !important;font-family:'canada-type-gibson','Arial','Verdana','sans-serif';font-size:14px;line-height:27px;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.8px;-moz-letter-spacing:0.8px;-ms-letter-spacing:0.8px;letter-spacing:0.8px;text-transform:uppercase;padding-top:24px;margin-bottom:0 !important;}.css-1ycc0ui::before{content:'—';margin-right:9px;color:black;font-size:inherit;} Emily hanford

KORBEY : Can you define what three-cueing means? 

HANFORD : The idea with cueing is that kids don’t need to be taught how to sound out written words. Instead, they can be given a whole bunch of different strategies to figure out what the words are. [Editor’s note: Popular three-cueing strategies include looking at a picture, looking at the first letter of the word, and guessing what word would make sense in context.] Three-cueing is a misunderstanding of how people learn to read, and you can trace it way back to the 1960s, before a lot of the research was done revealing how reading really works.

As many balanced literacy defenders will say—and they’re right—balanced literacy usually includes some phonics instruction, but phonics is often presented as just one way for kids to read the words. They can also do all these other [three-cueing] things to read the words. But that’s not necessarily making sure kids get good at looking at written words; sounding them out; coming up with the pronunciation of the word; then connecting the pronunciation of that word, the spelling, and the meaning. That’s the way we get words into our brain—so that we know how to read lots of words, tens of thousands of them, in a split second.

KORBEY : But with three-cueing, kids are getting cues from the book that aren’t necessarily connecting the sounds and the letters? 

HANFORD : It’s a pretty subtle idea. People who are up in arms about cueing bans are saying things like “They’re making it illegal for kids to look at a picture!” That’s one of my worries; it shouldn’t be illegal to do those things. My concern with cueing bans is that they’re easily misunderstood because this is something subtle, and people are saying things like “Kids can no longer use context when they’re reading.” Of course they can!

The point is that when kids are first learning how to read, the most important thing to make the transition from speaking a language to reading a language is to look closely at the words and understand that those words and spellings connect to a pronunciation of words that they know, or maybe they don’t know, yet. That is how you are going to get to be a good reader. Even a beginning reader is using context all the time to try to understand the meanings of new words.

KORBEY : At first, Lucy Calkins pushed back at criticism that the Units of Study program you reported on didn’t focus enough on phonics—then she changed her curricula . Did her adjustments have anything to do with “Sold a Story”? 

HANFORD : The first part of your question is all stuff that happened before “Sold a Story” even came out. She responded to my earlier reporting calling out problems with Units of Study in terms of its foundational ideas about how kids learn to read. 

I think she eventually learned some new things from the larger conversation about the science of reading—Calkins told me she said that to the New York Times . I think she was genuine; she didn’t know some of this. She is a leading teacher in the United States, and her reaction to some of this reporting was similar to the reaction that I got from many teachers: “I didn’t know this. Why didn’t I?”

Of course, the question for Lucy Calkins is: Why didn’t she know it? It’s a question that comes with a certain amount of accountability, because she has been so influential in guiding teachers over the past several decades. I think she should have known. 

KORBEY : Cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg, who you have used as a source, expressed concern about the rush to create “science of reading products,” noting in an article for Vox , “Now you have a huge demand for science-based practices pursued by advocacy groups and people who don’t have a great understanding of the science.” Do you agree with his assessment? 

HANFORD : He really knows the science, and he’s thinking hard about the implications. I can understand some of his critiques. But he isn’t an expert in curriculum or instruction; he doesn’t always know what it means to translate all of this into classroom practice. I always listen to his criticism, but I don’t think he has a 360 view. At the same time, I think he’s raising some very important questions. 

Curriculum is an important thing to look at—there are ideas about how people learn to read that are in the curriculum. In our reporting, we looked at very influential curricula—Units of Study, Reading Recovery, Fountas & Pinnell—because we were trying to understand what teachers are learning about how kids learn to read, where they’re learning it, and what’s wrong with it. But curriculum is just one piece—and maybe not the most important piece. When you walk in the door, it can be the first thing you see—and the first thing to get rid of or replace. 

We looked at curriculum for a reason, and people have mistakenly taken away from that that the curriculum is the thing to fix. That wasn’t actually the message of the podcast. Materials matter; teachers deserve and need good materials. But you can also teach kids to read with a whiteboard and some books and a marker.

KORBEY : Your critics say you’re pushing “false and divisive claims” about their methods. You’ve also been accused of “reigniting the reading wars” and politicizing teaching kids to read. Can you talk about the pushback? 

HANFORD : There’s been a few waves of pushback. I would say that I got a fair amount of criticism publicly on social media and in my email inbox from teachers and professors in schools of education, who were really upset about the reporting. Criticism I got from professors in schools of education was defensive; teachers were more shocked. 

More recent criticism came from within the reading science world. “But she’s only talking about phonics! There’s so much more to it!” A lot of that came from people who are already really engaged and knew a lot about how kids learn to read. And now there’s a lot of criticism and fear about the legislation: “There’s a bad law over here, and that’s your fault.”

KORBEY : Timothy Shanahan, who’s been a teacher and reading researcher for 50 years, says he’s watched the pendulum swing back and forth between phonics and whole-word reading methods. Where’s the pendulum at now, and is there anything different about the swing this time? 

HANFORD : I was hoping that the reporting would help this time be different. I don’t like the analogy of the pendulum; it swings back and forth, with no sense of progress.

What I want people to understand is why phonics matter, not just that you have to teach phonics. Why is it so important that all good readers have good phonics skills? If the pendulum is phonics—we teach some phonics, we don’t teach any phonics—I hope that never happens again. The whole point is, let’s not make phonics the thing that’s swinging here. Instead, let’s help people understand why that is one really crucial skill that kids need to have. If there’s something that children need to know, I think we should commit as a society to teaching it.

KORBEY : Hearing from kids and adults who struggled to read in “Sold a Story” is a reminder that real lives are affected when kids don’t learn to read well. What have you learned about the kids who aren’t learning to read well? 

HANFORD : I think that’s one reason why this has been so eye-opening to so many people. It cuts a very wide swath through society. 

I think people have misunderstood the reading problem in the United States as something that is mostly a problem in poor schools or among poor kids. It’s very clear that there are lots of kids from affluent homes who struggle with reading, but those kids are more likely to have parents as a backup plan. 

We can’t disentangle the role poverty and family income play when it comes to education outcomes in general. There’s clearly a connection. If you understand something about how kids learn to read, it’s very clear why kids in poverty are more likely to struggle. But that doesn’t mean that kids who aren’t in poverty won’t also struggle. It also doesn’t mean that kids in poverty can’t learn to be good readers and can’t be taught to be good readers—they can.

KORBEY : What’s next in your reporting? Are you going to continue investigating reading? 

HANFORD : One of the things I’m really interested in looking at are school districts that are getting good results with kids, often against the odds. 

I think we’re going to see that a common element is the long haul. Things don’t completely change in two or three years. Sometimes you can make changes over two or three years and then realize you’re getting some good results, but not enough, so you have to make more changes. 

In terms of what’s next for me, it’s going out there to see what’s working and what’s not. I really want to go into schools and districts and be able to see some schools figuring that out.

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.

More From Forbes

15 presentation tips for captivating your audience and commanding the room.

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Person speaking in front of audience

Public speaking can be a daunting task, especially when addressing a large audience. Whether you're giving a presentation in the boardroom or delivering a keynote speech at a conference, holding your audience's attention and maintaining command of the room is paramount. The ability to captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression not only enhances your message's impact but also builds your reputation as a confident and effective speaker.

Here, Forbes Coaches Council members share invaluable tips and strategies to help you conquer your fear of public speaking and ensure that your next presentation or speech is a resounding success.

1. Be Confident

Be grounded and confident to be yourself and then tell great stories. Use your voice and the stage to bring the stories alive. Your audience will connect to the emotion of the story but make sure that it is relevant for your audience and related to the topic. - Cath Daley , Cath Daley Ltd

2. Find A Way To Actively Engage The Audience

Be prepared with ways to get your audience engaged and keep their focus. Whether that's relating to your audience, telling a joke or asking questions, actively driving engagement will make for a more effective presentation or speech. - Luke Feldmeier , Online Leadership Training - Career and Leadership Accelerator for Engineers

3. Create An Emotional Connection

Creating an emotional connection with the audience and involving them in your session fosters active participation, and ensures your audience stays engaged throughout. This also serves to enhance your presence and to create memories that stay with them long after your presentation ends. - Kristin Andree , Andree Group

4. Put Your Unique Take Front And Center

Do you have something unexpected to say about your topic? Something that goes against the mainstream opinion in your industry or is maybe even slightly provocative? If so, putting your unique take front and center in the title and the beginning of your talk and explaining or resolving it later keeps your audience engaged and interested. - Micha Goebig , Go Big Coaching & Communications, LLC

5. Remember That The Audience Doesn't Know Your Planned Speech

No one wants to see you fail as a speaker. Remember that the focus shouldn't be on whether or not you can recall verbatim every word of your planned speech. The focus should be on how to connect to your audience with a few key points using a combination of storytelling and facts. - Sheri Nasim , Center for Executive Excellence

6. Adapt Your Language To The Audience

Talk about something they are interested in or include elements that will keep them interested. Start by asking why your topic matters to each and every one of them. Use language adapted to the audience. Keep the key messages to two or three maximum. Show them what you think and why you care about the topic. - Isabelle Claus Teixeira , Business and Human Development Consulting Pte Ltd

7. Try To Incorporate An Element Of Surprise

Engagement is the key to keeping the audience's attention. Invite participation, tell stories, walk around, have visuals, include humor, raise your voice and ask questions. Think of a comedian who points at someone in the audience: "Hey, you with the red shirt?" Everyone pays attention. What element of surprise can you present? - Susan Jordan, MBA, MSODL, PCC , Sphereshift Coaching and Consulting

8. Know Your Audience

Doing research ahead of time to ensure you're providing the subject matter in a personalized manner will keep their attention. The topic will dictate the necessary vibe. Based on that, providing opportunities for the group to engage, such as shouting out a word, raising a hand, etc., will also help maintain their interest. - Lindsay Miller , Reverie Organizational Development Specialists

9. Use The Problem-Agitation-Solution Approach

Don't just give a presentation — share a story. It must be a story-audience fit though. Use the P.A.S. — problem-agitation-solution — approach. Start with introducing a problem, follow by agitating the problem via telling a relevant anecdote and conclude by offering a solution by giving an audience a clear, direct way to avoid the pain and learn the lesson. - Alla Adam , Alla Adam Coaching

10. Tell The Audience What They Need To Hear

Instead of trying to figure out what to say, figure out what the audience wants and needs to hear. This shift in perspective allows you to tailor your speech in a way that keeps audiences actively engaged because it's good content that they want to hear. - Robin Pou , The Confident Leader

11. Go All In

To command your audience's attention you have to get into the spirit of what you're teaching and go all in without second-guessing yourself. People want to be led, but they'll be unwilling to follow someone who isn't confident in what they are communicating. - Arash Vossoughi , Voss Coaching Co.

12. Use A Compelling Opening

Start your speech/presentation with a compelling opening that grabs the audience's attention. This could be a surprising fact, a relevant story or a thought-provoking question. This initial engagement can help you establish a strong connection with the audience and set the stage for a captivating presentation. - Moza-Bella Tram , Moza-Bella LLC

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13. Be Authentic

Connect deeply with your essence and purpose. Radiate authenticity. When you're centered in genuine passion and truth others feel it, creating an unspoken bond. It's not about performing; it's about being present and real and offering value from the heart. That's magnetic. - Anna Yusim, MD , Yusim Psychiatry, Consulting & Executive Coaching

14. Let Your Audience Talk

There is nothing worse than stealing everyone's craving for autonomy and speaking the whole time. The person who does the talking does the learning. So, give some autonomy to the audience. Let them talk. Even if it's thinking time and talking to themselves, or to their neighbor or table group. This gains trust and they will lean into what you have to say even more. - Alex Draper , DX Learning Solutions

15. Leverage Non-Verbal Cues

My top tip is to engage your audience through storytelling. A compelling narrative captures attention, evokes emotion and makes complex ideas more relatable. Additionally, use body language and eye contact effectively. These non-verbal cues can significantly enhance your connection with the audience. - Peter Boolkah , The Transition Guy

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He Took His 68-Year-Old Secret to Court and Finally Confronted His Ghost

Robin Davis spent a long career in finance and philanthropy haunted by what had happened to him as a boy. Could an unusual trial on Long Island help him find peace?

By the time Robin Davis testified at trial, nearly everyone involved in the events that led to his lawsuit was dead. Credit... Dave Sanders for The New York Times

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By Michael Wilson

• Published Aug. 5, 2024 Updated Aug. 8, 2024

The 79-year-old man sat silently in the back of the courtroom on Long Island, 20 miles from his home in Queens. He wore a dark suit over his slim frame, as if back at his old offices in Manhattan’s financial corridors, at Merrill Lynch and Bank of America and other blue-chip firms.

Here the man, Robin Davis, settled in for what promised to be a strange trial in this mostly empty room. His lawsuit centered on the actions of a person long dead. His adversaries were Long Island bureaucrats who had never heard of that person or his reported misdeeds.

Generations had passed since the terrible acts that Mr. Davis described in his lawsuit, a dark stretch of weeks 68 winters ago, during the first Eisenhower administration. In this courtroom in 2024, he faced lawyers, a judge, a jury of strangers and a ghost who had haunted him for the better part of seven decades.

A ghost who had made him — for good and for bad — what he is today.

Mr. Davis had long been widely known for his philanthropy on behalf of one cause: fighting child abuse. Twenty-five years ago, he created a charity to raise money in the business community to fund boots-on-the-ground agencies in New York City and beyond that sought to treat and prevent the abuse of children.

Now, the trial would reveal the answer to a question about the charity that he’d been asked many times: Why? Why child abuse?

For years, he had come up with reasons. It’s underfunded, he’d say. There’s no poster child for abuse, like there is for childhood disease.

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Olympics 2024: Ellie Aldridge becomes first Olympic gold medallist in kitesurfing

Ellie Aldridge becomes first Olympic gold medallist in kitesurfing; there was major disappointment for John Gimson and Anna Burnet after their medal hopes were ended by disqualification in the medal race of the mixed multihull

Thursday 8 August 2024 22:02, UK

Britain's Ellie Aldridge became the first Olympic gold medallist in kitesurfing with a brilliant performance in Marseille on Thursday.

The discipline, which sees competitors fly above the water at up to 40 knots powered by huge kites, is making its Games debut.

And 27-year-old Aldridge, from Dorset, powered her way to gold by winning both races in the final series on Thursday.

"Today was all about winning races, if you don't win the races then you're not going to win so that's how I approached the day," she said.

"The first race was really close but I just about managed to get in front and stay in front and it was the same again for the second race."

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From Poole to the podium… our 50th medal of the Games and it’s a gold for Ellie Aldridge! 🥇 #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/bb6D5D3aJO — Team GB (@TeamGB) August 8, 2024

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Medal in Marseille! And it's GOLD for Ellie Aldridge in the inaugural kite competition! #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/xfCfb5W7do — Team GB (@TeamGB) August 8, 2024

The success salvages what had been a hugely disappointing regatta for Britain in one of its traditionally strongest medal sports, with Emma Wilson's bronze in windsurfing the only previous medal.

Light winds have made it a very frustrating fortnight for the sailors, with numerous races delayed and cancelled.

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Aldridge went into the final tied on points with France's Lauriane Nolot but behind her on count-back after failing to even reach the start-line in the last race.

Three wins are needed in the final series for an athlete to clinch gold, but the leader begins with two wins and second place with one, so it was all or nothing for Aldridge in the opening bout.

She handled it perfectly, leading virtually from start to finish to tie things up, and Aldridge, the world silver medallist, was even more dominant in the second race, with Nolot falling off her board early on and putting herself out of contention.

Ellie's Army ❤️ #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/xR6QYPhSJz — Team GB (@TeamGB) August 8, 2024

Aldridge was able to cruise to the finish line before celebrating her moment of history.

"It's been incredible, we haven't had the easiest conditions and it's been tricky but it's been really cool and I hope everyone watching on TV thinks the same thing. It's been incredible," said Aldridge.

The men's final has been postponed until Friday as the competitors were not able to start by the designated time.

It's BRONZE for Emma Finucane in the keirin! Her second medal of #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/c9BSLGziry — Team GB (@TeamGB) August 8, 2024

Emma Finucane added keirin bronze to the women's team sprint gold she won on Monday as the medals kept coming for Team GB in the velodrome.

Finucane, 21, narrowly beat her team-mate Katy Marchant to the last step on the podium after both British riders made it into the final.

New Zealand's world champion Ellesse Andrews showed her strength as she led from the front to take gold, while Dutch rider Hetty van de Wouw beat Finucane to silver.

"Going up in that final and scraping through the semi, I knew I had to find something in my legs that I hadn't seen before," said Finucane, who will now turn her attention to the individual sprint, in which she is the reigning world champion, with qualifiers to start on Friday.

"Ellesse Andrews is world champion, she has demonstrated today that she is so strong and all of the other girls in that final, we're the strongest girls in the world that's why we are in the Olympic final and to even be there next to one of my best friends Katy Marchant was such a pinch me moment.

"To get a bronze medal, it literally feels like gold to me because I left everything out there on the track."

Jones shocked in women's taekwondo

Jade Jones crashed out of the women's taekwondo competition in the first round in Paris.

The double Olympic champion was narrowly beaten by North Macedonia's Miljana Reljikj, then saw her slim hopes of a place in the bronze medal repechage dashed when Reljikj was beaten in her subsequent bout.

Bradly Sinden's bid to return to the Olympic podium came to a painful end as he was forced to withdraw from his bronze medal match in the men's -68kg category.

Sinden damaged his left knee in his second bout, a narrow win over Croatia's Marko Golubic, and was clearly hampered as he fell to defeat in his semi-final against Zaid Kareem of Jordan.

The 25-year-old from Doncaster, who took a silver medal in Tokyo three years ago, made the tearful decision to withdraw from his subsequent bronze medal contest.

Sinden said: "I thought I was in a really good position to get gold but in my second fight I felt my knee go and it made me feel a bit unstable in my third fight.

"I thought I had a really good chance winning gold this time, but such is life and I will move on and support my girlfriend Rebecca (McGowan) in her competition on Saturday."

McGowan competes in the -67kg category against Venice Traill, of Fiji.

Huge disappointment in medal race of mixed multihull

Earlier, there was major disappointment for John Gimson and Anna Burnet after their medal hopes were ended by disqualification in the medal race of the mixed multihull.

They went into the medal race in third position and well placed to match the silver they claimed in Tokyo.

But they crossed the start line fractionally early and, after not crossing back to start again, which would have erased the penalty, they were ejected from the race and slipped to fourth.

Gimson said: "We were over the starting line and we didn't realise we were so we continued with the race. We heard the shout but we thought we were bang on the line. We have to take it on the chin.

"We try not to judge ourselves on results. I'm unbelievably proud of how we sailed this week.

"We chipped away every day and got ourselves in medal contention for the medal race. We've won a podium at every single regatta this cycle so there's no regrets."

Gimson and Burnet's only hope was for the race to be abandoned until the wind picked up - a scenario that cost their British team-mate Micky Beckett a medal in the men's dinghy on Wednesday - but that did not happen.

"It's the worst way to lose the medal I guess because we were totally in control of the race," said Burnet. "But that's sport and that's sailing. It's been a tough old week. We've all given it our best and maybe it just wasn't to be."

Gimson and Burnet can not afford to dwell on their disappointment, though, with their wedding coming up early next month.

"Hopefully the wedding planning will be a good distraction," said Gimson. "We're about to find out how far Anna's mum's got with it. We've got a couple of weeks now. I'm sure you can sort a wedding out in a couple of weeks."

What happened on the track?

Laura Muir and Georgia Bell both saw themselves through to Saturday's 1500 metres final after securing top six finishes from the first semi at Stade de France.

Muir, the Tokyo 2020 silver medallist, was leading the pack with 300 metres remaining when Kenya's Faith Kipyegon made her move, extending her lead as she stormed to the finish in 3:58.64.

British champion Bell overtook her team-mate in the last 100 metres to cross in 3:59.49 as the second-fastest finisher behind the world record holder.

Muir was also passed by the United States' Elle St Pierre and finished fourth in 3:59.83.

Revee Walcott-Nolan had fought back to earn a semi-final spot from the repechage round, but a personal best 3:58.08 was not enough after she finished ninth in heat two.

What else has happened today at the Olympics?

Jack Laugher described a poor third dive as the "nail in the coffin moment" for his Olympic hopes after finishing seventh in the men's 3m springboard final.

The four-time Olympic medallist missed the chance to add another to his collection after finishing with just 410.95 points, while Team GB team-mate Jordan Houlden made an impact on his Olympic debut, finishing in fifth.

Laugher was handed a huge blow in the third round when he over-rotated on an inward three-and-a-half somersault, meaning he could only scrape 35.70 points and his medal chances slipped away.

It's an Olympic debut to remember for Jordan Houlden, who finishes the men's 3m springboard in fifth place. Jack Laugher finishes in seventh. pic.twitter.com/0Nl1w9PxIK — Team GB (@TeamGB) August 8, 2024

Reflecting on that moment, he said: "It was the nail in the coffin moment at that point really.

"I gave it my everything and really put my all on the line, unfortunately it just didn't go well.

"I wish at that point I could've pulled out, but I'm really happy that I continued on because I am a fantastic athlete and I always see things through, it just wasn't the fairy-tale I wanted it to be."

China's Xie Siyi won the gold medal, while team-mate Wang Zongyuan finished with silver and Mexico's Osmar Olvera Ibarra claimed bronze.

Advancing to the final 👉 Grace Reid (7th) and Yasmin Harper (12th) have both qualified for tomorrow's 3m springboard final! #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/lbtGGbs9FZ — Team GB (@TeamGB) August 8, 2024

Meanwhile, Grace Reid and Yasmin Harper both qualified for Friday's 3m springboard final, and Erin McNeice has qualified for the climbing boulder final after finishing seventh in the semi-finals.

Erin McNeice. Olympic finalist! She qualifies for the sport climbing boulder and lead final, after finishing seventh in the semi-final. #Paris2024 pic.twitter.com/VzFm5M2gAt — Team GB (@TeamGB) August 8, 2024

How to follow the Olympics on Sky

Keep up to date with the action from the Paris 2024 Olympics across Sky Sports digital platforms and Sky Sports News every day between now and Sunday August 11.

Alongside live news blogs and updates as records are broken and medals won on skysports.com and the Sky Sports app, Sky Sports News will also have dedicated reporters on the scene in Paris during the Games to gather the latest news both inside and outside the arenas in France as well as reaction to the big moments from medal winners, coaches, relatives and pundits.

Launching this August, Sky Sports+ will be integrated into Sky TV , streaming service NOW and the Sky Sports app - giving Sky Sports customers access to over 50 per cent more live sport this year at no extra cost. Stream The new EFL season, Test cricket and more top sport with NOW .

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