The most important question to ask yourself in preparing your talk is why on earth any physicist might be interested. This is dangerous: There is always the risk you will find no answer. But that is not necessarily a cause for alarm. Often when working on a problem for a long time, one does indeed forget what first led one into that line of endeavor, so if at first you can find no answer, think some more. What is there in the subject to capture the imagination of one lacking your highly specialized skills? Give yourself a week. If you still can find no reason why anyone not directly involved in the work should find it anything but tediously obscure, then you should find something else to talk about. Indeed you might then seriously consider finding another area of research.
It's taken from a Physics Today article called "What's wrong with these talks?" by David Mermin.
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