Public speaking pet peeve

You could probably do a whole new post on Public Speaking and Powerpoint. While the ubiquity of Powerpoint clearly reveals some demand, it has created a new set of vices: speaker reading out bullet points in monotone; the disappearance of the full English sentence from a presentation, and the seeping-in of corporate terminology even to technical presentations e.g. everyone wants take-aways and they don’t mean vindaloo.

I’d agree with the original article and all comments so far (especially the one about the sad doom awaiting anyone presenting at the end of a scheduled meeting.)

I’d add that chartsmanship is very important. Do not try to cram too much onto one chart, it’s just confusing. Related point–the rule of thumb of 1-2 minutes per slide is accurate. But if you combine 4 slides of material onto 1 slide, that doesn’t mean you can cover it in one quarter of the time. (This tends to be a problem in overview talks developed by committee in which each area is allotted a certain number of slides, using the slides to minutes rule of thumb.)

If you’re going to use bullet points, make them bullet points, not full sentences and paragraphs. Make sure all figures and graphs are well enough labelled (and well enough conceived) that they would be understandable even if you weren’t there to talk to them. Etc.

Essentially, good and well conceived charts make your talk easier and do a lot of your work for you. Poorly designed charts make your job harder by confusing the listener and requiring additional explanation.

Re: Moderators.

I don’t think there is a shared understanding of what a moderator is supposed to do. Three possible roles:

1) Referee only (stay out of the discussion entirely unless a panelist/audience member drags it way off topic or engages in outright attack).

2) Gentle overseer (make sure that all panelists get a chance to talk, cut off questioners if they go on too long)

3) Discussion-shaper (keep panelists themselves on track, reframe questioners’ remarks to make them more pointed and direct questions, keep things moving, time-wise)

Beyond these, some folks see their role as PURELY timekeepers and others think they’re responsible for prepping panelists on the topic slant beforehand (often with very good results, especially if panelists aren’t familiar with their audience’s level/background).

Horrible moderation usually stems from a clash of expectations. Audience is hoping for a #3, and moderator is too intimidated/lazy/confused to be anything except #1.

Just my experience.

‘The best explanation I can come up with for this phenomenon is simple narcissism. We all hate it when others go over. But our own work is so extra special good that it ought to be the one exception to the rule.’

The other really embarassing thing is someone zooming through about ten power point slides while mumbling ‘hmmm….sorry about this…thought I was going to have more time….em….sorry…anyway as I was saying…’ while slides with titles like ‘the meaning of life, proved’, ‘chemical formula for the cure of cancer’ and ‘scientifically proven solution for situation in the middle east’ are brought up on screen for under half a second, given you just enough time to clock the titles, and nothing else. Very embarassing.

What is the solution? As a poster above said: practice. Run through your talk WITH an audience of bribed workmates and embarassed friends, WITH a stopwatch. (get them to ask obvious questions as well: this will give you practice at that, too). Your talk (at a conference) should clock in at 25 minutes absolute maximum, and 20 is better. Rememeber: every one else will zoom over their allotted time, and people will love you for keeping to the timetable, even if they don’t remember anything else about you.

Also: a shorter talk means more questions, which other academics love as it gives them another chance to hear the sound of their own voices.

For an ‘hour’ long presentation, try and make it such that you can do it all relatively easily in 45 minutes. Never ever ever ever ever run over your time: regardless of situation, audience, or how important you are. After an hour nobody cares that you are a greater physicist than Einstein and Newton put together: after an hour all they are thinking is about is how long the queue for the toilet might be.

(1) Funny: It’s OK to be funny if you actually are a funny person, and your sense of humor is shared by 95% of the population. Since people like this are rare, I’d go light on the funniness. If you happen to have an appropriate joke, use it, but oh god, few things are less painful than hearing poorly delivered lines that wouldn’t be funny even if delivered by a professional comedian.

(2) Insider jokes and reminiscences: No-one gives a damn about the fact that you were last at this convention center 8 yrs ago with your first wife, or that you and the moderator used to play tennis together.

(3) Introductions by the moderator. One minute on who this person is and why we might want to trust what they say is fine. Five minutes (and more!) going on about how this guy is the greatest scholar in this field in the western hemisphere and listing every one of his publications, positions and prizes simply makes it very very clear to the audience what an ass-kissing twit you are.

In the business world it goes back to the paper cup analogy. A paper cup only holds so much (we figure 10-15 minutes of information). Any pitch thereafter is pretty much just the info spilling over the top of the cup. Make your points early and simple.
Same with blog comments, too.
PP

I can only chip in with the academic side of things, and indeed can only repeat what’s already been said (yes, yes, I know). I’m not sure which annoys me more, presenters who knowingly overrun or moderators/chairs who let them. I also agree with the narcissism theory. This can also be found in Q&As where the questions always seem to come round to the questioners little niche/obsession, regardless of its relevance to the paper. All the points regarding presentations apply thrice-over to asking a question.

This is huge huge problem in academia, and especially irritating as the solution is so obvious: if every moderator cut people off smack at 15 minutes (or 20, or whatever the alloted time was) at every academic panel/conference/event out there, people would learn to accomodate their time frames. It would become obvious that the “oh, if I’d only had a few more minutes this would have been a GREAT talk” approach is (as it always has been) a cop-out, and within a year this problem could be solved forever. I just don’t understand why it hasn’t already happened.

At another job we had a Toastmaster’s Club. It was invaluable for learning to use your time well as each speech was timed.

I went to a conference last year where the organizers had build a gizmo they called The Tower of Light. It had red, yellow and green lights like a stop light.

At the beginning of your talk, the light would be green. When you had less than five minutes to go, the light would turn yellow and when you had less than a minute, it would turn red. If you went over your alloted time, the red light would flash on and off.

If we’re talking your average major professional association conference panel in academia in the social sciences and the humanities, the reason that few people time themselves, practice or take any of this good advice is that the average professional association conference panel is inconsequential in the extreme and the panelists know it and the audience knows it. The average panel audience is friends and possibly colleagues of the panelist and a smattering of people who think the topic might be slightly interesting, a number which goes up if the conference is being held in a city that none of the attendees likes that much. A great many panels at such events serve other functions: they allow people from universities and colleges that require a paper to be given in order to have their costs covered to have their costs covered; they are professionalization events for ABD/newly minted PhDs where they can communicate something of what they’re doing to potentially interested senior people; they’re a compulsion for completion of a paper that might serve for later publication. They’re not, generally, for entertainingly or engagingly communicating anything to an audience. As a result, folks don’t necessarily put a lot into preparation. It’s hard to think why they should, because the best-practiced, best-edited short professional conference presentation is worth exactly jack and shit in most professional contexts: it’s heard by about ten people and it’s unpublishable in the form you give at the panel.

And yes, I’ve heard people mutter that a paper was too short–that’s another problem you run into that pushes presentations up–the insane asshole senior person who associates gravitas with length, density and boringness of someone’s presentation. I’ve actually heard a colleague say of a paper given by a junior scholar that was short and entertaining that it was “without substance”, when in fact the paper was quite substantive, just short and entertaining. It was quite clear to me that this judgement got passed precisely because the presentation was fun to listen to.

There are exceptions, of course. I’ve been in the audience for panels where the papers or presentations are all really interesting, occasionally even a really interesting paper that goes long. I’ve seen quite a few roundtables with sufficiently compelling people that were really impressive. There are people who are always pretty good in these contexts even when they’re just reading a paper that they’ve edited on the fly for presentation.

A lot of this doesn’t apply to many of the sciences, where peer review operates in a different way prior to conference meetings, and where what is done at conferences is often the heart and soul of knowledge dissemination in a particular field of research.

Re: 22. Some variation of that system of such lights is used at oral argument in most US appellate courts. Suffice it to say that the moderators in that setting are generally quite firm about enforcing time limits.

As the secretary of an Alcoholics Anonymous group, I hear people speak before a group at least once a week. Of course, most of these people are not public speakers, except during the time they lead a meeting of AA, so it’s probably more than a little churlish to take offense at this–but it’s amazing how many of the speakers I hear say the words “you know” or “y’know” pretty much CONSTANTLY during their leads. Some people say it as many as twelve or fifteen times a minute.

Since the purpose of attending an AA meeting is to learn how to stay sober and how to live a sober life, and not to critique the speech habits of the people who lead the meetings, it would be incredibly rude for me to point this out to the speakers. But that doesn’t mean I can’t beseech the readers of this blog to try to avoid this nasty habit when they speak in public.

When you practice your speech, ask a friend to keep track of how many times you say “you know” or “y’know.” If you do it more than once every two or three minutes, then you have a problem, but you can learn to avoid it. I’m no great shakes as a public speaker myself, but thanks to my hyper-awareness of this verbal tic, I very seldom say “you know” during my own leads, as far as I know, anyway.

There’s one really important tip you’ve left out: watch other speakers closely. Analyse what they do that works, and what doesn’t.

Doing that, I cottoned on to one really important point that I’d always taken for granted: put your points into the form of a story. Human minds are hardwired to absorb info in the form of narratives.

I learnt lots of other things too, but they’ve already been covered here. Lets just say that I’m quite a fascist when I’m moderating – I think stealing other’s time is selfishness.

From a recent (business, not academic) conference I attended:

1. If you want to persuade someone to change a decision they’ve just made, do not call the decision wrong and do not state frequently how you are amazed that the decision-makers could arrive at such a stunningly wrong decision.

2. Unless you’re with an audience that you know already knows your credentials, take a moment to state them. (I spend a lot of time talking to engineers, and the conversation goes much better when they know I have an engineering degree.)

3. If you get a hostile question, do the three Rs:
– Reflect the question. Repeat it back rephrased and check that you’ve got the question right.
– Respect the question. Say something like “Yes, many other people have said similar things.”
– Respond to the question.
If you think you’re likely to get hostile questions, practice this method with a friend beforehand.

Tracy,

That’s something one also works on at Toastmasters. seeking to focus on exactly what you’re saying makes to lose the filler words.

I had the joyful experience of being ‘taught’ how to give presentations by someone who showed up late, patronised and infuriated her audience, repeated herself, ran over time, and couldn’t work the technology she was using as a visual aid. This took over two hours. If anyone doubts that students have proper respect for their professors any more, bear in mind that I did not bang my head against the desk or yell, “For Christ’s sake, woman, shut up already!”

Tom (31)–

I think context here, is important (and maybe we’re misunderstanding each other). I’m not saying you shouldn’t answer questions–I’m saying you should think, in the context of your presentation, of likely questions and come up with well-thought out answers before you speak.

Everyone who’s ever given a paper/talk/interview knows the things they didn’t get to in the main body (that proleptic parenthetical that grew to a whole paragraph, etc.): that’s the stuff I’m talking about. If you come up with a nice mix of long and short answers, then try to fit what you’ve rehearsed to the questions asked you–with appropriate reframing, you’re just going to come off as a lot more professional (and, I’d say, give your audience a better experience).

I was initially horrified by this proposition, thinking, as you seem to be, that it amounted to a lot of empty spin. No such thing. It’s really the difference between being capable of giving articulate, well-calibrated answers to questions and spending more time than necessary fumbling for answers.

This takes a lot of work, no doubt–and there are times when it doesn’t make sense (but then: even attorneys spend a lot of time coaching their witnesses). My experience is as visiting lecturer/tv/radio interviewee (and, before that, as a software executive)–in all of these instances, the latter especially, you’re given a fairly limited time to make as much impact as you can. The more you practice all the elements of your performance, the better it will be.

Way back up at #7, Doug T said that “the rule of thumb of 1-2 minutes per slide is accurate” and “Make sure all figures and graphs are well enough labelled … that they would be understandable even if you weren’t there to talk to them.”

My approach in giving presentations is almost the opposite in both cases. First, variation of pace is as important in a presentation as in any other medium – I have slides which stay on screen for 15 seconds and (admittedly more rarely) slides which I can talk to for ten minutes (and that’s not because they are visually cluttered). That’s closely related to the second point: for almost all my presentations, the innocent reader couldn’t work out the narrative just by looking at the slides. I can read bullet points faster than any speaker can read them out, and I assume that everybody to whom I am presenting can do the same. The purpose of slides is to illustrate, to emphasise, to make it easier for the audience to remember. The most common and most devastating error I see is the extraordinary number of presenters whose slides are clearly there as props for the speaker and not for the benefit of the audience at all.

I have absolutely no experience of presenting to academic audiences, so can’t speak directly to the applicability of this. But aren’t academics human too? And for a bravura disply of all the above, watch Dick Hardt in action (and no, I know nothing about him beyond that presentation – but I wish I could do that).

This thread is probably dead, but I see a variation of Marek’s peeve all the time from inexperienced students: They’ll distribute a handout and then simply speak to what we can all simply read. I’m willing to guess that a lot of PowerPoint presentations have the same flaw.

So: We can read faster than you can speak; don’t give us a reason not to listen to you.

As for using visuals as signposts for the presentation’s organizational structure, I’d say that if the structure isn’t logical, no amount of external prompting will make it so.