Too often, it seems, the mark of a “good” scientist is the ability to give an excruciatingly embarrassing and incomprehensible scientific presentation – the sort of presentations that litter academic conferences.
Borne out of long-standing frustration, I posted a tongue-in-cheek 12-point plan for the “perfect” presentation on Twitter yesterday:
How to give the best scientific presentation – ever! pic.twitter.com/pezmgkZIDZ
— Andrew Maynard (@2020science) June 4, 2016
(You can download the PDF here.)
Although on the surface this was a bit of fun, it was the result of years of frustration sitting through inept, ineffective presentations at scientific meetings.
The thing that broke the camel’s back was the realization that, in some places at least, graduates and early career scientists are actually being mentored in giving embarrassingly bad presentations!
This really needs to change.
(And feel free to add additional rules in the comments!)
Update June 11 2016 – you can now download the 12 steps to a perfect scientific presentation as a PDF slide deck here:
Update June 12 2016 – And to complete the set, here’s the Bingo Score Card – no conference presentation should be without it!
Well, thank you for ruining my day! I had comfortably settled into a lethargic time (100 degrees in Portland — not right, not right) when I read this and was transported back to the past 30 years of falling asleep in darkened rooms to the sound of some highly respected scientist or engineer droning on about something important I should have been listening to, and then snapping awake to tepid applause. The guilt has overcome me.
Seriously, though, I agree with you wholeheartedly. For all of those in the science business such as yourself who are lucid and straightforward about stuff, there are 99 others who aren’t. I wonder if that (still) correlates directly to professors who don’t know how to give a decent lecture in class? There’s a crying need for some kind of Presentation 101 (oral and written) that scientist should be required to take AND pass for both their undergraduate and graduate degrees. Tenure for professors should also depend on continuing education in same.
Thanks Brian.
I’m not sure about the correlation with teaching ability – although there’s still an underlying attitude in some institutions (not all thankfully) that teaching is a not-too-important add-on to research.
What I have noticed (although this is very anecdotal) is that the quality of presentations tends to go up at more high profile and interdisciplinary meetings (like AAAS), and is at its worst at smallish, discipline-specific meetings – of which there are a lot!
There are also some professors who do a fantastic job at teaching their mentees how to give good presentations. But then they seem to be outweighed by those that don’t see the problem sadly.
And I’ve got to include an incident that nearly broke my heart a few years ago. When my son was a rising senior, he interned in a research lab, along with a number of other high school students. At the end of the internship, they were required to give a public presentation of their work.
The presentations mirrored what you would expect (sadly) at a scientific conference – ticking many of the boxes above. Seeing one after the next give unintelligible, obfuscating talks, it felt like they’d actually been mentored in doing everything possible to prevent good communication.
Sad and unnecessary.
I love this Andrew! For quite a few years I thought it was me who was too stupid to understand. However, tho I have done my fair share of crap PPTs myself, academia is on a totally different level. How does this get rewarded I wonder. It’s a mystery to me!
I think it’s partly that some academics develop a skill in decoding messed-up scientific presentations (nothing like showing how smart you are when, after a completely unintelligible presentation, you ask a seemingly insightful question!). And it’s partly that people don’t take the point of conveying information to the audience seriously.
Some of this is discipline protectionism – the idea that if you don’t understand the complexities of what is being talked about, you’re not part of the core community. This has some merit if the aim is for deep experts to talk amongst themselves. But the reality is that, if you were to ask most audiences to summarize the key findings in a scientific presentation (including their robustness and relevance) after listening to it, they wouldn’t be able to.
Number 13 should be don’t include anything that takes the attention away from you. Definitely forget anything about where you work (but love up who funds your science as that gives you some cred). Remember its all about you and if they don’t understand its their fault (and loss).
Have you seen/read anything by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, at Storytelling with Data?
http://www.storytellingwithdata.com/
Not exactly presentation guidance, but some excellent information on how to make your data tell the story you intend, and not get lost in the pie charts and graphs we are so fond of using (which typically just confuse the audience and don’t tell the story at all). I think so many of us forget that what we are really doing is telling a story, rather than unloading a pile of data.
No – thanks for the link!