How to Answer Questions During Seminar or Job Talk

This is an excellent twitter thread written by Michael Kraus, a psychologist at Yale. 

I will summarize the basic idea (and of course adding my own opinions while I'm at it). The ability to answer questions during a job talk is very important. The best way to prepare to answer questions is to..make sure you know the answers to the questions. Give as many practice job talks as you can to many different people so that the questions do not come as a surprise. Some questions come up often. Consider answering those within the talk. If that isn't possible, be sure to have a well-prepared answer to those (maybe a link in your slides to the answer). Also, know the background of  your topic. If you're studying the impact of a particular policy, know the details of that policy. Have a quick look at the most closely related papers on the night before your talk so you know the literature. 

Even if you do all of these things perfectly, there will still be questions you can't answer.  My favorite piece of advice from the thread: 

..it is okay to say you don't have an answer to a question--your data can't possibly be comprehensive enough to answer every important question. But, don't stop with "my data can't speak to that." Add what data you'd need, the analysis you might do, or the study you'd design.