In a commentary on Cassuto's article, Daren Brabham adds this very important point:

I want to emphasize that the prospectus document is meant to get you to the meeting so you can talk about your project in front of a panel of experts. The meeting is meant to help clarify issues that may have occluded your view and to engage in a conversation with your committee about the work you plan on doing. Defense, may in fact be the wrong posture for these meetings. I found that my committee members asked tough and important questions, listened carefully to my responses, and pushed me–all of this was not to make me defensive about my project but to aid in widening my field of vision so that I could see important issues I was missing. What emerged is a set of lingering questions that I must attend to in my dissertation, but the tone of the meeting was never defensive. Instead, I found my meeting to be a rigorous and challenging conversation with experts in the field. This conversation model is important because as we progress beyond comps and through the dissertation process we emerge as colleagues instead of students. These meetings, as conversations, help facilitate that movement.

Here is an article from The Scientist with advice. It also provides links to other resources. It has been reprinted in the Tomorrow's Professor blog, and can be found there as well.

How to Write Like a Scientist, 23 March 2012, Science.

But, for god's sake, work on your presentation skills and practice. Effective communication to an audience is not an in-born skill for most people.

Edwards on How to Give an Academic Talk

Advice on designing scientific posters, Colin Purrin, Swarthmore College (Eytan notes this is somewhat long, and he doesn't agree with all of the advice).

Poster and Presentation Resources,UNC Graduate School (this is actually a collection of several resources from various others)

Tips for Posters in the Humanities, Stanford.

His two main points as I see them: methods courses often focus too much on procedure, when they should focus first and foremost on research design and the nature of evidence. And, statistical significance is not substantive significance.

Blanchette, "Academic Work", Information Studies 298-C, Winter 2010, UCLA

I like this, but, at least for a seminar talk (50-80 minutes rather than the 12-18 typical at many conferences), I would precede the big donut with a smaller semi-donut, which is the left half of the big donut in miniature. That is, spend the first minute (and maybe one slide) quickly setting the scene (the context), then briefly but clearly introduce the problem you tackle, state your results (without demonstrating or supporting them, then sum up your contribution. After that brief intro, get with the more detailed context - contribution - context program.

This is very similar to the classic storytelling exposition I've elsewhere advocated. As in a typical (not post-modern) novel or movie, immediately set the scene, identify the protagonist and the conflict he or she faces. In stories the resolution (results) often aren't broadcast up front (though they may be foreshadowed), to build suspense. Sometimes that kind of suspense-building works in a scholarly talk, but often giving a sneak peak at the results is helpful / necessary in motivating the audience to be interested in what comes.

(This is updated and republished annually, I believe, in the October issue of JOE, which is available online.)

The take-home points were two: To communicate better, focus on story telling, and on story perceiving (or the application of standard human cognitive principles the way in which you tell the story). The focus on applying cognitive principles to design is fairly conventional these days, but I think the value of using a story telling approach is overlooked. I don't mean litter a presentation with personal anecdotes, but to consciously develop and design the entire presentation as a single story, following classic story structure and tropes.

I prepared a handout summarizing the points I made during the session, and adding some additional tips, citations to further reading, and an example of how I develop my stories (before I even open my slide software), following the method described by Cliff Atkinson. (Having a take-away handout is one strong recommendation for an effective presentation.)

I'm also putting up my slides, though the way I use slides to illustrate my talks, the slides are useless without the speaker notes, and even then they are not very effective as a PDF file. They do demonstrate my commitment to using media to illustrate and emphasize and stimulate, rather than as set of on-screen lecture notes. (I only checked the screen momentarily during the talk, to verify synchronization.)

(My bad: The images are all either Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr, or shots found via Google Images on the open web, but I was behind in my preparation and I neglected to write down sources. Usually I try to be better about giving attribution.)

One of Deirdre's lessons I've embraced almost as much as William Strunk's "Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's" is her condemnation of the "table of contents paragraph" (known by others as the "roadmap" paragraph):

Still another peice of boilerplate, and one which kills the momentum of most papers in economics on the second page, is the table-of-contents paragraph: "The outline of this papers is as follows" Don't, please, please, for God's sake, don't. Nine out of ten readers skip to the substance, if they can find it. The few who pause on the paragraph are wasting their time. They can't understand the paragraph until, like they author, they have read the paper, at which point they don't need it. Usually the table-of-contents paragraph has been written with no particular audience in mind, least of all the audience of first-time readers of the paper. Even when done well it lacks a purpose. You will practically never see it in good writing, unless inserted by an editor who doesn't know good writing. Weak writers defend it as a "roadmap." They got the idea from Miss Jones: "Tell the reader what you're going to say. Say it. Say that you've said it." It's exceptionally bad advice, and the person who made up this memorable phrasing of it is burning right now in Hell." (p. 37)

Somewhat surprisingly, his own article, for someone pursuing a PhD and wanting to "rid the world of crappy lectures", is pretty dreadful. But this extensive link collection is useful.

Here is a presentation by former SI communications manager, Frank DeSanto, that he did for our summer undergraduate research program (REU) last year. He makes a number of good suggestions.