I’ve just finished attending the 2011 Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis, which means that in addition to giving a couple of talks about creationism in science education, I’ve sat through scores and scores of technical presentations by other scientists. While many of these talks were very well done, quite a number suffered from a set of similar mistakes that severely detracted from the speaker’s ability to get his or her points across.
It might therefore be worthwhile to consider some of the ways that scientific presentations fail to communicate, and how they could be better crafted for a conference such as GSA. Of course, I pontificate with this unrequested advice without hope that anything will ever change; because the majority of presentations repeat these errors, there is something deeper going on here, some mysterious magnetic force of obfuscation pulling presenters toward ineffective communication and away from talks that are clear, cogent, and concise.
Here, in my opinion, are some ways scientific talks could be made more effective.
Introduce yourself.
It sounds basic, but in almost no cases did I observe speakers taking a moment to say their name, their university affiliation, and what they do. Something as simple as, “Howdy, I’m Kilgore Trout, and I work on cephalopod paleontology at Miskatonic University” could work wonders toward helping the audience understand just who is talking to them. In most cases, I’m lost a minute into the presentation; I don’t remember who this person is, I don’t understand what he or she does, and I’m certainly lost as to the topic he or she is going to talk about.
State the main point. Repeat the main point at the end.
I can’t emphasize enough that scientific presentations tend to be detail-rich but context-poor. Many presentations begin with a long recitation of data in a table. The audience is left wondering, “What does this mean? What is this about? Why should I care?” Such questions are never answered. There’s just this continuous stream of data without any context. Audiences need the big picture, right up front.
If I were talking to the presenters one-on-one, I would stop them and ask, “Hey, hold on! Give it to me all in just one sentence.” This sort of big picture sentence is key in other industries. Movie pitches come in various lengths, including the “elevator pitch” that is a one or two sentence shot during a very brief social interaction, such as sharing an elevator ride. Scientists need to use more elevator pitches to communicate what they do.
A good presentation should start off with a sentence that explains what it’s all about. And don’t fear repeating this sentence. This is about the big picture--we need the big picture. In fact, the big picture may be the only thing that most audience members take away from a talk; they cannot, of course, absorb tables of numbers flashing by, but they might remember a major point--if
that point were ever articulated.
Lose the blue background with yellow text.
Too many slides are blue with yellow text; it's become a visual cliche. If I had my way, the option for a blue background would permanently disabled from all copies of PowerPoint (with the possible exception of UC Berkeley-related presentations. Go Bears!).
I do not know why blue is such a prevalent color in our society. People wear blue shirts; people wear blue jeans. The sky is blue; Miles Davis was kind of blue. Everywhere we are awash in blue, blue, blue. Enough with the blue already! Let’s have one thing in this world that isn’t frakking blue!
A significant percentage of the talks I've seen have one of these two backgrounds:
Both are distracting and over-used. Having a bad background to your talk is like trying to give your talk in a whisper while a hyperactive child is moving in front of your podium; no one is going to hear what you say with all that cranky business going on.
A white background with black text is perfectly acceptable; a white background with grey text looks pretty cool and Apple-like. Or a subtle textured background, like paper, with a faint three-dimensionality to it, can be very soothing to the eyes. Steve Jobs favored grey gradients for his presentations. All of these backgrounds work--just please stop making your background monotone blue with yellow text. There are other colors in the EMR spectrum.
Make the pictures bigger.
Almost every picture in the presentations I saw at GSA this year--and for that matter, at every scientific conference I’ve ever attended--was way too small. I think this “small picture syndrome” derives in a McLuhanesque way from the technology we use to construct presentations. People sit a foot or a foot and half from their computer screens; from their perspective at the keyboard, the details of the picture look fine. But for someone seeing the picture for the first time, it’s too small and becomes confusing. The audience leans forward in their seats trying to see what the picture shows. No one can really make it out. Then the slide changes and the process repeats, until the end of the talk. No one has really understood what the pictures were trying to show.
People also try to cram three or four pictures on every slide. Making a presentation is not a contest to maximize space; in fact, having open, unused space is preferable. Don’t crowd every slide; give the talk breathing room.
What makes the most sense of all is to use one picture per slide, with the picture taking up all the screen space. If you think a picture is important enough to put in your talk to other scientists, then blow it up big enough so they can actually see it. If it’s small enough to be ignored, then it’s unimportant enough to omit.
Another good strategy is to take a “detail” of a picture. This is what art books do; they show the whole picture, then follow with pages of details to help the reader see what’s going on in the painting. If you have a graphic taking up a lot of space, but you want to show a small sliver of it more detail, then making a transition slide that magnifies that sliver is a great idea, especially if you then drop back down to the original size to give context.
Make the figures bigger.
This is a general failing. I can’t remember how many times this year I saw speakers turn to a slide that had some figure on it, then apologize by saying, “You can’t probably can’t read this, but it says…” Urgh. If the audience can’t read it, why put it up at all? If the figure was so trivial that the audience did not need to see it, why waste time putting it up at all? If the figure was vital, why not make sure that people could actually see it?
I understand why this happens. People are dragging and dropping figures they’ve used in papers. They don’t want to remake the diagram. But it’s easy to remake your diagram in a way that will more clearly show what you’re talking about. Consider that for every major figure you have, you should make a “journal diagram” that will go with the submitted paper, and a simplified “presentation diagram” that is appropriate for slides.
Make the text bigger.
As with the size problem for graphics, most people make their presentation with their computer screens right up in their face. When it comes to the presentation, the font size that seemed right on their screens is now too small in the auditorium, and no one can read the slide.
It’s a typical fault. The solution is to grit one’s teeth and bump up all the font sizes larger than you think they need to be. I know that it looks wrong on the screen a few inches from your face, but when it’s projected on a screen a hundred feet from the audience, it will look fine.
Also, a note about PowerPoint: Microsoft likes to make fonts change size as you add more to a text box, and this can be gruesomely fatal to the look of your presentation. You need to turn this feature off and use only one font at one standard size throughout your presentations. Some may say, “Steve, I need to put more words there than will fit at that big font size.” To which I respond, “No. No, you don’t. You’re giving a talk, not writing a book. Use a word or two to prompt you, but speak the talk, rather than read the talk.” This point segues me to...
Don’t read slides word for word.
This is an embarrassingly-frequent problem. So many presentations consist of nothing more than the speaker reading, word-for-word, lengthy text. I know why people do this: they’re nervous they won’t know what to say, so they write everything out, word-for-word. Overcome your fear and learn to give a presentation.
This problem speaks to the need for required speech courses as part of everyone’s undergraduate curriculum. In my required speech course at Suisun Community College, I remember that the instructor spread consternation among the class when she announced that most of the talks would have to be done without notes of any kind, just speaking from memory. This is useful, and every college student should be forced to learn how to do it. The crutch of notes makes many presentations unlistenable.
In an ideal presentation, each slide would contain just one or two prompt words, perhaps to give the audience the spelling of an unusual word. But the screen would be filled with a large graphic that will capture their eyes. The speaker’s job is to use the laser pointer to explain what the graphic is showing. Every slide needs to have a graphic; however, in many presentations, it’s just blocks of text, one block after another, all of it read out loud by the speaker.
Because by necessity I can, like many academics, speed read, it takes me only a few seconds to scan a slide full of text. By the time the speaker has spoken the title, I’m done with the slide. So I sit there, my arms crossed, patiently waiting for the speaker to finish reading all the text. (I find these pauses a good time to make a move on the multiple WordsWithFriends games I have going on my iPhone.) Then the slide changes, and in a few seconds I’ve read it all, and the process starts anew. It’s unbearably boring. Reading to the audience makes the presentation deathly boring. Be the anti-Nike and Just Don’t Do It.
Use sans-serif fonts for titles, serif fonts for text.
This is a rule of thumb, not to be followed strictly, but it can be useful when thinking about laying out text. Headlines have much more visual punch when they are a narrow, closely-kerned sans-serif font. Text reads smoother to the eye with serifs.
A word of caution, though, is to avoid using more than two types of font on each slide. You can get away with a headline font and a text font, but if you go much beyond that then it becomes painful to the audiences’ eyes and distracts from the presentation.
An ideal font is one that balances readability with visuals aesthetics, all the while fading into the background like the soundtrack to a movie. If your audience thinks about your fonts, you’ve failed. If you audience gets distracted by your fonts, you’ve failed. Make the fonts as integral to the presentation as the calm tone of your voice.
Lose the centered text.
One of the first rules one learns in graphic design courses is to avoid centering text. Centered text looks juvenile; it’s something kids like to do. But as adults, we have better options. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t seem to hire people with graphics experience to put together its software, so a centered headline is a common default on PowerPoint themes. People can be forgiven for making their talks this way; in a McLuhanesque sense, they’re being directed to do so because it’s how their software wants them to do it.
But chose a better option. Left-justified text is fine; right-justified looks even more interesting. Choose one and stick with it.
Whatever you do, don’t mix type justifications on one slide. Make all text justified one way--left or right--and stick with that unless you have a very good reason. (One possible justification is to wrap text around a graphic, but that should be a rarity, no more than one slide per presentation.)
Use bullet points sparingly.
I just do not understand the thinking that goes into the design of Microsoft products. On almost every PowerPoint template, when you click in the text box to write what’s going to appear on your slide, the first thing that automatically happens is that you find yourself writing in a bulleted list. This is wrong on so many levels that there’s not space here to explain, but suffice it to say that bullets should be the rarity rather than the default; bullets have a place, but not with every line of text.
Microsoft’s default here pushes users toward making horrible-looking slides, in which all their text is arranged in some sort of half-assed, bullet-determined nested hierarchy. This is no way to make a slide. Avoid bullets and simply make your text justify without unneeded ornamentation.
Lose the “talk identification” on the first slide.
Many presentations started off by giving the date and the conference, in addition to the speaker. I’m left wondering: “Does this speaker think I don’t know where I am? Does this speaker think I am unaware of what day it is?” These completely unnecessary distractions need to be removed.
Lose the speaker/university/page number crawl along the bottom of each slide.
Some talks seemed to prepared according to some institutional template, so that each speaker has an identical looking slide, with the institution and slide number along the bottom. I can’t say enough how bad this looks. It’s as if the talk is some sort of branding exercise.
A talk is a performance. Anything that distracts from that performance needs to be burned away, until the only thing left is the core of what you’re trying to say. Distractions such as slide numbers are an egregious visual annoyance; frankly, when a talk has those, I find it hard to listen to the talk and my eyes are drawn away from the slide material to the bottom. Instead of hearing the speaker, all I can do it keep thinking to myself, “Jesus, that looks bad. Why would anyone do that?”
Lose the copyright symbols
A significant number of talks have little copyright symbols along the bottom of the page. The pretension that someone would actually want to steal your slides is preposterous. Also, if anyone did actually steal your data, then you would have proper legal recourse, even without a distracting and unnecessary copyright symbol.
Thoughts cannot be copyrighted, in any event, so once you’ve said something out in public then everyone else has fair rights to it. In the modern era, a good rule of thumb is that if you speak it or put it on the Internet, then it has now become public domain, in fact if not in legal practice (I’m one of those who thinks the openness of the Internet should change laws more than laws should change the Internet). Instead of imagining that a copyright symbol on the bottom of each page somehow protects you, a much better viewpoint is that the purpose of scientific conferences is to share information, openly, without restriction.
Lose the lengthy institutional thanks.
Many of the talks ended with a slide thanking all the people who helped with the project. That’s fine, but speaking at a scientific conference is not the same as winning the Oscars.
While I understand thanking individuals for their personal help, what makes even less sense are the institutional thanks. Sure, your work was helped out by an NSF grant. Fine. But do we really need to have our time taken up talking about this? Are presentations really the place for such a thing? If so, when does that stop? If I corner you outside in the hall and ask a few questions, which you answer with knowledge you gained in part from an NSF grant, are you then obligated to thank NSF after answering my questions? Is it something like the Intel duh-do-duhduda jingle that has to be chimed whenever Intel’s name is mentioned in a commercial?
There’s a time and place for thanks. And scientists should be thankful for the research money they receive (though I might argue because many grants are so small and miserly, some of that thanks might be given a bit tongue in cheek). But a presentation is a performance. You’re on stage. Seconds are counting down. Do musicians thank all of their music teachers after each concert? Did Picasso paint a thank you to his mentors at the bottom of each painting? When the amount of time thanking institutions who are not even there competes with the talk itself, it all seems a bit much.
Finally, don’t use PowerPoint.
Many academics use Macs, but of these, the majority still use PowerPoint to write their presentations. This makes a certain amount of sense; people keep doing what they are accustomed to doing, and PowerPoint has been around a long time. But there is far superior presentation software available, Apple’s Keynote.
In every way, Keynote runs smoother, quicker, and can do a lot more than PowerPoint. Using a Microsoft product on a Macintosh is like swapping out the engine on a Porsche with the engine from a Yugo. Sure, the car may still run … sort of. But there’s no reason to use such a primitive, clunky, and underpowered program as PowerPoint on a race car computer such as a Mac.
One downside to using Keynote to write talks is that most computers are PCs and therefore only run PowerPoint. A simple solution is to export your finished Keynote presentation as a pdf; this preserves your slides exactly as they appear to you. This can also be a good way to make sure you don’t have any font issues; you may use a splendid ornate font that is installed on your computer, but if you transfer your PPT to another computer that doesn’t have that font already installed, then it won’t display correctly. Pdfs are a good way to overcome this.
Pdfs also load up fine on PCs, and you can run them full-screen simply by changing the View to View Slideshow. Pdf files do not preserve transitions, but you really shouldn’t use a lot of cute transitions--text bouncing into place, or swooping all over the screen--unless you are 12 year-old who finds such distracting gimmicks amusing.
Well, that’s it. Over the years, I've made all these mistakes in my own presentations (and may still do so in the future!). But creating talks that are even a little bit clearer will help communicate science.
