I have a confession to make: I sometimes fall asleep during seminars. I can feel it happening, and try very hard to concentrate, but when the room is dark, and the speaker is mumbling softly, facing the screen instead of the audience, and all the slides are graphs or longwinded bullet points, and the topic is slightly outside my regular field of expertise, I can’t help but nod off. I always wake up when my head falls forward, and we’re always still on the same slide, but really, that can’t be good.
This often happens during only one talk of a two-talk seminar hour, and not necessarily the second talk, so it’s not just my lack of sleep. It’s also not entirely attributable to the topic, because I’ve been fully awake and interested during talks about things I know nothing about. Someone in my department gave a talk about the 4th dimension last year. I still don’t quite understand the science/maths behind it, but it was a great talk and I listened all the way through.
This slideshow with presentation tips for slideshow talks is not specifically aimed at scientists (no, really, we need those data slides once in a while) but it does have some good advice.
I’d just like to add something to these presentation tips: please, please, please address the audience and not the screen! Honestly, I’ve attended talks where the speaker was with her back to the audience for 20 minutes. I don’t even know what she looked like!
I used to also advocate not memorizing everything word for word, but some people with terrible presentation-stage-fright told me that they sometimes black out during the talk and can only get through it if they have everything memorized literally. That allows them to keep talking on autopilot when they’re having a moment of panic. I guess that’s okay. But then don’t memorize your jokes, because they’re not funny if you’re on autopilot, and you’ll just get even more nervous if nobody laughs. Only sparingly add jokes if you’re confident about your presentation skills and your (and the audience’s) sense of humour.
3 comments
That’s a great slideshow, but doesn’t address an important question – why do you need a slideshow at all? Too often they are there as memory-aids for the presenter rather than of being much use to the audience. I once received a commendation for being one of only two people at a seminar who didn’t use Powerpoint, relying on my native abilities and … er … charisma.
I’d like to add another penn’orth to the mountain of advice that already exists on this topic: lecturers really must learn to use microphones properly. It seems my mis-spent youth (and middle age) spent in rock bands wasn’t so mis-spent after all… I think I’ll expand this into a blog entry of my own …
I personally need something to look at, as an audience member, so I do appreciate the slides most of the time. If you give a talk without any images, I have nothing to hang on to, but if there is a picture in the background, I can relate to that and remember: “Oh, he was talking about this or that when the picture of the lion came up.”
I did forgot to mention another pet peeve: “presentation karaoke”, where the text is on the slide, and the presenter reads it out loud while following the words with a laser pointer.
I agree about Presentation Karaoke, but sometimes it’s necessary. I’ve used it when I know for a fact that at least one person in the audience is deaf and so will need ‘subtitles’. And it’s very helpful if the presenter knows that they have a vry quiet voice, or a thick accent, and uses it effectively to get the message across.
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