Viewers should be able to skim the poster from several feet away and easily make out the most significant points. Probably less than you would like! One of the biggest pitfalls of poster presentations is filling your poster with so much text that it overwhelms your viewers and makes it difficult for them to tell which points are the most important. How do I narrow my project and choose what to put on my poster? This audience will be less interested in the specific details and more interested in the what and why of your project-that is, your broader motivations for the project and its impact on their own lives.

If you are presenting in a setting where some audience members may not be as familiar with your area of study, you will need to explain more about the specific debates that are current in your field and to define any technical terms you use. This type of audience will probably most interested in clear, specific accounts of the what and the how of your project. If you are presenting at a conference in your field, your audience will likely contain mostly people who will be familiar with the basic concepts you’re working with, field-specific terminology, and the main debates facing your field and informing your research. The answer to this question depends upon the context in which you will be presenting your poster. You want viewers to notice and take interest in your poster so that they will pause to learn more about your project, and you will need the poster’s design to present your research in a way that is easy for those viewers to make sense of it. You will need to decide on a small number of key points that you want your viewers to take away from your presentation, and you will need to articulate those ideas clearly and concisely. What goals should I keep in mind as I construct my poster? Poster presentation formats differ from discipline to discipline, but in every case, a poster should clearly articulate what you did, how you did it, why you did it, and what it contributes to your field and the larger field of human knowledge. Poster sessions have been very common in the sciences for some time, and they have recently become more popular as forums for the presentation of research in other disciplines like the social sciences, service learning, the humanities, and the arts. It allows you to display your work to a large group of other scholars and to talk to and receive feedback from interested viewers. A poster presentation combines text and graphics to present your project in a way that is visually interesting and accessible.

Make a poster