Great research is wasted unless you can communicate your ideas to others.
The two principal ways researchers do so are by writing papers, and by giving research talks. Nevertheless, many papers and talks, even by well-established researchers, are amazingly poorly presented. There are many simple things that everyone can do to improve talks and papers, regardless of whether you are a natural speaker or a fluent writer.

In these two linked talks, I will try to abstract lessons from my own experience of writing about and presenting research, in the hope that they may be of use to you. I expect that some members of the audience will also be experienced researchers, with good ideas of their own. Nothing would delight me more than to move from presentation into two-way discussion – so please come prepared to make your own contribution.

S. Peyton Jones

yesterday we gave an oral presentation on interactive 3d rigid body systems visualization. the subject isn’t all that exciting, but still, it has some interesting key points, and we decided to make the presentation as fun to watch as we could. our 10 minutes of fame went well, i shall say. :) much of this we owe to Mr. Simon Peyton Jones. he wrote a couple of papers on how to give a talk and to write a scientific paper, and gave a delightful talk on haskell subjects in braga, some years ago. on his socks. :)
you can reach the pdf’s here, and get more information about Mr. Jones as well.