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SUMMARY Although the health care community expects its members to make effective presentations, presentation strategies are seldom explicitly taught. Those who do attempt to systematically teach or learn these skills soon realize that `how to' guides for making effective presentations contain useful, but not sufficient, information. To become an effective presenter, it is necessary to understand not only the generic strategies that characterize effective presentations, but also the context-specific presentation strategies of a particular practice community. The framework for making effective presentations proposed in this paper is grounded in the knowledge of how experts acquire and use strategy knowledge, and takes into account not only the `how to' of making presentations, but the circumstances and belief systems that determine effective presentation strategies in varying contexts. The framework is designed to make presentation strategy knowledge more transparent, and to permit presenters to learn from every presentation they give and attend.
Introduction
At the end of a 45-minute presentation, a medical physicist receives resounding applause from an audience that includes nurses, pharmacists, physicians, health records staff, and social workers. His presentation is talked about with excitement during the coffee break. Later, you watch participants enthusiastically fill out written evaluations of the presentation. How did the medical physicist take a seemingly dry and obscure topic and make it the subject of so much interest and discussion?
Although the health care community expects that its members come ready and able to present conference papers, host grand rounds, present cases and provide community education, most health care professionals would be hardpressed to articulate how this medical physicist made his presentation the topic of conversation. For many, answers to this question might range from `natural charisma' to `years of experience'. This response is understandable, since presentation strategies are seldom explicitly taught. It is more likely that these strategies are learned through immersion in a particular practice community, with new practitioners adopting the practices of experienced members. The result is an implicit understanding of what makes an effective presentation-an understanding which is applied with surprising consistency, but which the presenters themselves often find difficult to describe. To make these tacit understandings even more difficult to articulate, presentations also vary across contexts and disciplines: case presentations vary from paper presentations, and the...