Don't use journal article graphics in a slide presentation

It is not uncommon for scientific presentations to include graphics that have been prepared for journal articles. Don't do this! A graphic for a journal article serves a very different purpose than an effective visual for a slide presentation.

Figures in biomedical research journals typically contain multiple graphs, abbreviations, and a great deal of complexity. Axes are in small font and often written in a vertical format. This can be acceptable, even desirable, in a journal article because there is the opportunity for the author to explain each graph and the reader can take the time to reread the article and study the figures in depth. In a journal article the audience (the reader) sets the pace for learning.

The opposite is true in a slide presentation. The speaker sets the pace for learning and the audience suffers with inappropriate tempo. When a new slide appears the audience does not know what part of the slide to focus on. Those multi-graph slides derived from journal articles add to the confusion.

Every slide in a presentation needs to have one overarching message and the data should support that message. Extra graphs that the speaker does not discuss only confuse the audience.

Remember, "talk about what you show, show what you talk about." If you don't talk about it, why is it on the slide? Take the time to edit those journal article figures so that they are appropriate for a slide presentation.

Never believe the comment, "good presentation," part 2.

As I wrote in an earlier post, it's too easy to get compliments on a bad talk. People want to be nice. Make sure you have an honest friend in the audience who can give it to you straight.

My addendum is that even the most experienced and skilled presenter can mess it up. A few years ago I was working with a very senior biomedical researcher and we were preparing a presentation that represented a major "ask" from a very wealthy donor. I suggested he "dry run" the presentation. His response was, "I've given hundreds of presentations so I don't need to do that."

Not surprisingly, it was a disaster.

Every presentation poses problems for audience comprehension. The presenter needs to identify those challenges before presenting and think about the language that will best help the audience. This challenge exists no matter how experienced and expert you may be.

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.