Legal Research

"Who Says Technical Presentations Can't Be Engaging?"

Posted by Garr Reynolds: "People often ask if technical or science-related presentations can be as compelling as presentations covering other less technical topics. Now, not every presentation has earth-shattering, Nobel-Prize winning significance, but I assume if you are talking about your research or current issues in your field, etc. that your words have a benefit for someone else. I assume it is important, otherwise why waste your time and the time of others? And if it is important, then being effective matters. No one ever said that clarity and a connection with the audience were sufficient conditions for an effective talk; we only ever said they were necessary conditions.

Three years ago I gave some advice for people giving technical presentations in this post. The money quote I still believe is from engineer and scientist Dr. Jay H. Lehr in his 1985 article "Let There Be Stoning" (download article in PDF).

"Failure to spend the [presentation] time wisely and well, failure to educate, entertain, elucidate, enlighten, and most important of all, failure to maintain attention and interest should be punishable by stoning. There is no excuse for tedium."

                                                            -- Jay H. Lehr

This week I heard from Naveen Sinha, a graduate student in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He too has noticed three things that the good lectures/presentations share. In his words:

1. They have an outline near the beginning of the talk, which they repeat along the way so the audience can become reoriented with the larger-scale structure of the presentation.
2. The slides use a full sentence at the top to summarize the key point, or none at all. Shorter titles are rarely effective. I learned about this from "The Craft of Scientific Presentations" and it's been good advice so far.
3. The slides are as simple as possible.

Continue reading this interesting post at the source site listed below.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on June 30, 2009 (boomark / email).