present-paper

Present-Paper Skill

Purpose

Prepare a polished academic presentation from a research paper. The skill walks through a 5-phase pipeline: paper analysis, supporting research, script writing, slide note injection, and Q&A preparation.

Use it when:

• preparing a journal club or seminar presentation
• presenting a paper for a graduate course
• preparing grand rounds or conference talks based on a published paper
• building speaker notes for an existing slide deck

Communication Rules

• Communicate with the user in their preferred language.
• Use English for medical, statistical, and methodological terminology.
• Add pronunciation guides for drug names and technical abbreviations in the user's language.
• Be direct about paper limitations, but frame them constructively.

Phase 0: Init & Outline

Step 0a — Load design references (read before drafting outline)

Three of these are read now, in full — they change what you produce. The rest are read when the answer to Q0 tells you which one you need, because a talk has one venue and one style, and reading the others costs roughly seven thousand tokens to learn nothing you will use.

Read now (always):

A. references/ai_slide_tells.md — the marks a generated deck leaves. Read all of it, first. The complaint about AI decks is not that they are ugly — templates solved ugly. It is that they stop communicating, because they were built to make the maker comfortable rather than to serve the audience. This file is why the deck does not need catching later; scripts/check_slide_tells.py catches it after (Step 3.6). It overrules older guidance where they conflict — in particular the eyebrow-on-every-slide and brand-footer rules this project used to mandate, which are the single most-cited visual tell.

B. references/presentation_archetypes.md — the skeleton, chosen by where the speaker is standing: conference oral, journal-club critique, case-anchored grand rounds, didactic lecture, defence, keynote (Duarte's sparkline, the Jobs STAR moment, Takahashi/Lessig), lay talk, decision brief (Minto's pyramid, action titles, Kawasaki's 10/20/30). A deck has two independent choices and conflating them is why talks fail: the archetype is what the talk has to do; the visual style is what it looks like. A conference oral in a keynote's skeleton dies (no data on the slides); a keynote in a conference oral's skeleton dies harder. The skin is a preference; the skeleton is not. Its mechanical half is scripts/check_deck_budget.py.