To gain skills in preparing and delivering a talk or poster with recourse to the Rhetorics of Science and Medicine. This includes practical and reflective skills that might help you improve your academic presentations (teaching etc.) in general but scientific conference presentations in particular. 

Learning outcome

• Apply skills in rhetorics for preparing and delivering research presentations with a focus on scientific talks and posters
• Use reflective skills in evaluating performance in academic presentations
• Apply principles for giving and receiving feedback

Content

Rhetorics is the science or art of how people employ language (traditionally oral language, i.e. speech) effectively and persuasively. 

The oral research presentation is a genre used throughout the researchers’ career from PhD to senior researcher. However, research presentations  demand careful planning on behalf of the oral presenter. The researcher needs skills in rhetorics in order to prepare a presentation in accordance with the purpose and situation. Furthermore, she needs to deliver the presentation properly. The researcher should also be able to use and choose appropriate modern information and communication technology (ICT) to support the presentation.   

Along with rhetorical and technological skills to prepare the presentation and master stage performance, reflective skills are needed. When getting a scientific abstract accepted for a conference, it might be the expectation that the researcher has already acquired a high subject matter knowledge. However, less is assumed in terms of presenting skills. The skill of communicating with other experts must be supplemented with knowledge about rhetoric of science and medicine in order to disseminate the intricacies of learning to be a good research presenter. The rhetorical and reflective skills trained in this course will benefit mainly research presentation. However, this will also be beneficial to other academic presentations such as lecturing.