How to Write a Lecture
Many professors, instructors, and educators can present a lecture with the barest minimum of notes and presentations. For first-time lecturers, though, presenting a lecture can take hours or even days of preparation and research. If you’re going to present a lecture for the very first time, here are some tips to guide you along the way.
Lecture Outline
All lectures, presentations, and reports start with an outline. The outline serves as your rough draft on how lectures proceed. Without an outline, you’ll be forced to deliver the lecture extemporaneously. While some people can deliver a lecture freely without the aid of an outline, most people will find that their discussion will go all over the place.
Lectures should be quick and easy to understand, so they must flow freely and quickly through the duration of the discussion. Here are some essential parts of a lecture outline:
The introduction includes the background and significance of the lecture, and a general description of what you seek to explain in your lecture.
The methodology or theoretical framework frames your discussion in the context of other studies and researches that preceded it. You may also briefly discuss findings of your lecture or analysis.
Discussion. The bulk of your lecture should be composed of discussions. Chances are that your audience will browse your research or look through your lecture notes to analyze the findings, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time throwing out statistics or quoted passages.
Conclusion. To end your lecture, your conclusion must be brief, and should be supported by everything you already said in your lecture.
Lecture Notes
Lecture notes are handouts given to the audience so that they can follow the lecture and use it as a reference for their own studies. Try to avoid printing out PowerPoint slides; you need to write a concise, pithy version of your study in a few pages.
When writing lecture notes, use complete paragraphs instead of bullet points. Lecture notes are used as reference material in many instances, so you need to use passages that may be quoted by students, academics, and other researchers. Writing lecture notes is a very challenging exercise in revision, so you need to refer to your own study or analysis, and trimming it to around five to six pages for a presentation.
Practice Good Scholarship
Writing a lecture should still be committed to good scholarship. The same scholarly techniques that you used to write your study should also be found in your lecture:
Citations. Make sure to use consistent, properly-structured citations throughout your lecture notes.
Findings. Don’t attempt to pad your findings in favor of your hypothesis, or just to put forward a good impression to the audience. When using statistics, be very prudent in your calculations.
Writing a lecture takes a lot of preparation and skill. With these steps, you can start to write your first lecture and make a promising delivery that can make - or break - your academic dreams.