academic_presentation_design v1.0.0

name: "academic_presentation_design" description: "Design academic talks and slide decks: conference talks, seminars, thesis and dissertation defenses, and grant pitches. Covers talk structure by venue, assertion-evidence and figure-first slides, readable citation density, timing budgets, backup slides for likely challenges, and a deck audit script. Triggers when the user asks to build, restructure, rehearse, or review a research talk, defense deck, seminar slides, or grant pitch." metadata: { "includeInPrompt": true }

Academic Presentation Design

Purpose

Turn research material into a talk a specific academic audience can follow, check, and question: a conference audience that has read nothing, a seminar room that will interrupt, a defense committee that has read everything, or a grant panel forming a view in minutes. The output is a slide by slide deck plan with a timing budget, figure and citation rules applied, backup slides for the hard questions, and an audit pass before the talk is rehearsed.

This skill designs the talk and its slides. For writing the paper sections behind it, use the related writing skills. For building the deck file in a specific tool, use that tool's skill after the plan passes audit.

Workflow

1. Fix the venue facts before designing anything. Get the slot length, how much of it is questions, whether questions come during or after, the audience (read the paper or not), the room or video format, and any organizer template or slide rules. Read the venue instructions the user has. Structures by venue live in references/venue-structures.md. If the slot is unknown, ask. A 12 minute conference talk and a 40 minute defense are different designs, not the same deck at different speeds.

1. State the one claim of the talk. Write the single sentence the audience should be able to repeat afterwards, and the two or three findings that support it. Every slide must serve that claim or earn its place as setup for it. Material that does not serve it moves to backup or out. For a defense, the claim is the contribution. For a grant pitch, the claim is what the aims will deliver.

1. Budget time before slides. Subtract question time from the slot first. Plan about one slide per minute of talking time as a first pass, and give the main results figure up to two minutes. Organizer guidance behind this: IEEE WIFS 2024 set a 15 minute slot as 11 to 12 minutes of talk plus 3 to 4 minutes for the chair and questions, at no more than one slide per minute. Write a Speak time on every slide in the plan. A deck with no per slide times has no timing plan, only a hope.

1. Write the deck plan in audit format. Use the block format the audit script reads: a ## Slide N - Section heading per slide, then Assertion, Evidence, Speak, On-slide words, Source or Citation where a figure needs one, and Backup yes or no. The worked example at references/worked-thesis-defense-plan.md is a complete 21 slide defense plan in this format. Start from it and replace its content.

1. Write assertion headlines, not topic labels. Each slide headline is one full sentence that states the slide's claim, fits two lines, and sits left aligned. "Results" is a label. "Mentored students returned at a higher rate in all three cohorts" is an assertion. Support the assertion with visual evidence in the body of the slide: a figure, diagram, photo, equation, or words arranged visually. Avoid bullet lists as the body. This is the assertion-evidence approach from Michael Alley's Penn State guidelines, which set headline type at 28 point, body text at 18 to 24 point, and reference listings and callouts at 14 point.

1. Build each results slide figure first. Pick or remake the figure before writing any supporting text. One message per figure, axes labelled with units, series labelled directly where possible, bar charts starting at zero, sample sizes and intervals on the slide, and the key comparison highlighted while the rest recedes. Full rules, including table handling, are in references/figure-and-citation-rules.md. If a paper figure has four panels and the claim needs one, show the one panel large and move the full figure to backup.

1. Set citation density for a listening audience. On the slide where a claim appears, use a short citation, first author and year, with the source line on any borrowed figure or data. Put full references in a references slide after the close, a handout, or the shared deck notes, and tell the audience which one you chose. Never place a number on a slide that cannot be sourced on request. Venue by venue density guidance is in references/figure-and-citation-rules.md.

1. Cut on-slide words hard. Slides support the spoken talk, they are not the talk. The working caps in this skill: over 40 on-slide words on a body slide draws a warning, over 70 fails the audit. Keep lists to two, three, or four items. Move explanation into what you say, detail into backup, and prose into the handout. This follows Mayer's coherence principle: material that does not serve the point costs the audience working memory it needs for the point.

1. Design for the back of the room and for access. Sans serif type, body text at 24 point or larger as the working target for a projected room, and nothing the audience must read set below 14 point. Text contrast of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text, the WCAG AA ratios. Unique title on every slide, alt text on figures in the shared file, meaning never carried by color alone, and slide numbers on every slide from the title onward. Defenses and hybrid talks depend on numbers because people refer back by them.

1. Build the backup set from the questions you fear. List the ten questions you least want asked, add the standard challenges for the venue, and mine the deck for comparative words such as better, faster, or robust, each of which needs numbers behind it. One backup slide per question, placed after the closing slide, numbered, carrying evidence rather than talking points. The full method and the in-room answering protocol are in references/defense-and-questions.md.

1. Audit the plan, then rehearse against the clock. Run the audit script on the plan with the real slot numbers:

python3 scripts/deck_audit.py <plan.md> --budget-min <slot minutes> --questions-min <question minutes>

Fix every FAIL. Judge each WARN on its merits and record the ones you accept. Then rehearse out loud with a timer, in front of a person if one is available. Cut in this order when the talk runs long: background, method detail, secondary results. Never cut the main figure, the limitations, or the takeaway. Re-run the audit after cuts, because slide renumbering breaks backup references.

1. Prepare the room kit. Export the deck in the native format and as a PDF backup, put both on two devices or one device plus a cloud copy, and carry the full reference list and the question log from rehearsal. For a defense, give the committee a copy of the slides if local practice expects one.

Output Contract

• A deck plan in the audit format above, one block per slide, with per slide Speak times that sum inside the talking budget.
• The venue facts the plan was built against, stated at the top: slot, question time, audience, format.
• A clean audit run at handoff, zero FAIL lines, with any accepted WARN lines named and the reason for each.
• A backup slide list that pairs every backup slide number with the question it answers.
• A rehearsal note: measured run time from at least one out loud rehearsal, or a plain statement that rehearsal has not happened yet. Never report a rehearsed time that was not measured.
• The worked example is fictional and labelled as such. Any example deck plan built for a user uses their real material or clearly marked placeholders, never invented results presented as theirs.

Operating Rules

1. Every factual claim in the talk must trace to the user's material or a checked source. Never invent numbers, dates, quotes, citations, or findings, and never dress a placeholder up as a real result.
2. Venue instructions beat this skill. When an organizer, program, or funder sets a template, a slide limit, or a format, follow it and note where it forced a trade off.
3. One claim per slide. A slide that needs two headlines becomes two slides.
4. Do not misstate prior work to make the gap look bigger. Committees and seminar rooms contain the people who wrote that work.
5. In a defense, credit precisely: use I for the candidate's own contribution inside joint work, name collaborators on the slides where their work appears, and state limitations before the committee has to raise them.
6. Keep the style plain. No em dashes in slide text or in the plan. Sentence case headlines, no all caps body text, no italics for emphasis.
7. Facts about methods cited here come from the sources file at ~/workspace/skill-production/scratch/academic-presentation-design-sources.md or a fresh check, never from memory alone when the user will rely on the number.