An 11th commandment

RecentlyI posted a commentary on the Nature Jobs Blog. The commentary identified the 10 most significant presentation pitfalls, taking off from talk show host David Letterman's famous countdowns of the top 10 in a category. The post can be found at:

http://blogs.nature.com/naturejobs/2016/02/10/a-david-letterman-like-countdown-to-the-10-biggest-pitfalls-in-scientific-presentations/#more-8957

Actually it was hard to limit the number of pitfalls to 10, so here is number 11:

Creating separate audio and visual narratives

Too often the speaker's words are not related to the visual on the screen. The audience doesn't know whether to listen to the speaker or try to read the slide.

Your job as speaker is to explain the slide. There should be a communication synergy between your oral narrative and the visual. Use the pointer to show the audience which particular part of the slide you are discussing. If there are elements of the slide you don't discuss, ask yourself why they are on the slide. Most of the time you can remove them, helping the audience focus on the key points.

Talking faster is not an answer to time constraints

This week I attended a conference that featured a 90 minute session. The first two speakers took 35 minutes each, leaving the last speaker with only 20 minutes for a planned 30 minute talk.

First of all it is important to stick to the allotted times. The overruns meant that there was no time for questions. Questions and challenges are a critical part of a presentation. You want the audience to react. You want to understand what they are not understanding.

The last speaker chose to give his 30 minute presentation in 20 minutes by talking faster. The slides became a hopeless whirlwind.

A major theme of this blog is to build a presentation "up" and not to "cut down" (see earlier tip). The first step to developing a 30 minute presentation is to develop a two minute presentation and then build up with a 5, 10, 15 minute presentation. If you have developed your presentation properly, you will know how to cut back if the time is less than you planned. Talking faster only confuses the audience. Resist the childlike urge to say everything you know.

More often than not, the time you have for a presentation will be less than originally planned. Go into every presentation with a battle plan for cutting content, not speaking faster

Two common mistakes

Early this week I heard a presentation by an excellent speaker. The individual spoke loudly, clearly, and had a gift for verbally organizing thoughts and words. Nevertheless the presentation had some real problems and the speaker communicated far less than intended. There were two major problems:

1. The slides did not help the speaker. They were cluttered with a massive amount of irrelevant information that distracted the audience. The speaker never made reference to this extraneous material on the slides. Remember, if you don't talk about something on a slide, ask yourself why it is there, and nine out of ten times, you'll remove it. This speaker would have been far more effective not having any slides and drawing a few figures on a white board.

2. Information overload. The speaker attempted to present a fairly detailed account of six recent clinical trials. This was way too much information for the audience to absorb. The speaker would have been better off describing one trial and providing concise summaries of the other five (if the audience really needed to hear about all six). We all suffer from a child-like impulse to talk about everything we know and there is a tendency to assume that the audience understands and retains everything we say. Reject these urges! The audience cannot absorb great detail. There is a tendency for speakers to develop talks for themselves rather than the audience. The speaker needs to help the audience every step of the way.