Defence speech to match your slides

What to say at your thesis defence: a speech that fits the slides

The opening talk at the obrona is short, and students who struggle with it are rarely short of content. What they lack is a spoken version of it. Written academic Polish, with long sentences and passive constructions, is hard to say aloud under pressure and hard for the committee to follow. A defence speech needs a different register: one idea per sentence and clear signposts such as “first”, “the main result is” and “to conclude”.

The speech is written slide by slide, so you always know which part of the text belongs to the slide on screen, and timed to about seven minutes unless your department sets another limit. It opens with the customary address to the committee and closes with a brief thank-you, in the form usual at Polish universities.

If Polish is not your first language, mark the words you find hard to pronounce and tell us: we can replace them with simpler equivalents without changing the meaning. Practise the opening and closing lines until you can say them without looking; the middle can stay closer to your notes.

The speech costs 25 €, or 85 € together with the slides, and the price is the same for any deadline. It is written to sit alongside the slides, so if you change a slide after rehearsing, send it over and the matching part of the text is adjusted.