The Zen of Presentations, Part 54: Worse than reading bullet points

Everyone hates it when presenters read bullet points. It is one of the most common complaints about what PowerPoint has done to presentations. We can all read faster than any presenter can speak. If there is no more information than once the presenter has written on the slide, it's excruciating to wait for them when we've already know what he is going to say.

But there is something that just might be worse than reading bullet points out loud.

Reading the title of each slide out loud.

Slide titles are often just single isolated words, or short descriptive phrases at best. Consequently, reading titles breaks the flow of your speech, and sounds completely unnatural.

“Morning, Ralph. How was your weekend?”

“Introduction. Pretty good. Got out, did some shopping.”

“What did you buy?”

“Product description. Got a deal on a new flat screen TV.”

For all their problems, bullet points usually at least resemble normal sentences. Bullet points read out might be simple and dull, but at least they’re somewhat grammatical.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 53: Doing it vs. talking about it

When you are in the thick of a project, the time you spend getting stuff done might look like this.

Because of how much time you have spent learning that technique, getting some initial preliminary results, then having it mysteriously fail for no reason, troubleshooting, learning that your boss calls part of the technique “black voodoo magic”, offering sacrifices to the lab gods, it is understandable that when you are given the chance to talk about that research... you spend the same amount of time describing those techniques.

I think this is particularly a trap for people who are just coming into a project. When I learned a new technique, I was so excited about this technique giving me my first data that I focused too much on the technique, and not enough on the data.

It’s worth noting that in research articles, the methods section is often set in small text or placed last in the article, after the conclusions. Both of these are good indications that descriptions of techniques and methodologies are fine print. Relatively few people are going to be tremendously excited by how you optimised your buffers, or found a great way to manipulate data in Excel.

The breakdown might look more like this.

Many presentations jump into the details way too fast. A lot of good technical presentations are characterized by long introductions. Having an introduction take up half your talk is not out of the question. The data that answers a question and what you conclude about it should make up most of the rest.

The time you spend talking about stuff you did in your project need not – indeed, should not – bear much relationship to the amount of time you spent on that task.

Related posts

Poster Venn (Better Posters blog)

The Zen of Presentations, Part 52: Big finish

Two people go in for a rather invasive and somewhat painful surgical procedure. The nature of the procedure means that the can’t be anesthetized. To keep track of their pain, the physicians ask the patients to rate the level of pain they’re experiencing at regular intervals, from one to ten. Imagine this is charted below.

When the red line hits “0”, it’s because the procedure was done.

Some months later, on a follow-up, the patients are asked to describe their overall experience.

You would expect the patient whose responses that are plotted in blue in the chart above would report the experience being much worse. If you add all the numbers, this person’s average pain was higher, and they were in pain for much longer.

The patient whose responses are in red usually reports the experience being much worse than the patient whose responses are in blue, even though this person’s procedure was shorter, and they were in less pain overall. Why?

Endings matter.

The entire experience is profoundly influenced by that last memory. The patient in red ends in almost excruciating pain; the patient in blue ends with mild discomfort. And that last experience tends to be one that sticks.

This might explain why twist endings in movies and television and other stories are so divisive. They can be spectacularly successful or agonizingly bad. Sometimes a great ending saves an movie or episode and turns the run-of-the-mill into something quite amazing (e.g., The Sixth Sense). How many times have you been going alone, carried along with a story... and the ending ruins it, and you leave with a sour taste in your mouth? (E.g., Jacob’s Ladder.)

This talk - the most popular Ignite! talk to date - could be significantly improved:



This talk is popular because it is so useful. But the ending... a recap? What do you need a recap in a five minute talk for? Peoples’ memories aren’t that bad.

Nancy Duarte nailed what an ending should be in her book Resonate: a vision for a better tomorrow. She calls it, “the new bliss.” The new bliss sets out what could be, if the audience takes the story you have told them and acts on it.

Here’s a great example of an ending that lays out a new bliss. It’s Hans Rosling talking about the magic of washing machines:



A world with washing machines is not just a world with clean laundry. A world with washing machines is a world where machines have freed up time for parents to read books to their children.

In a scientific talk, the new bliss can be something as simple as a more complete understanding of some fine theoretic point that people in your field will appreciate. It could be ruling out an hypothesis. Or it could be a shifted paradigm. Or maybe there are big potential practical spin-offs that could come out of the work.

Put a lot of work into your endings.

Note: I heard the patient story on an online video somewhere; I thought it was on the TED website, but can’t find it gain. If anyone recognizes this and can point me to it, I would be most grateful!

The Zen of Presentations, Part 51: Redrawn

“This is so ugly.”

I have been preparing for my talk at the University of Texas San Antonio this week. For context and background, I wanted to include some graphs from other, previously published papers as well as my own stuff. There were two problems.

First, the quality of the graphs I wanted to use wasn’t always there. Many were old, pixelated images. Some graphs had unlabelled error bars, and some had text overlapping with error bars. Some bar graphs had hatching to distinguish the bars that was not very pleasing to look at.

Second, the style of the images I wanted to use varied wildly. Some were monochrome, some used colour. Some used serif types, some used sans serif type. The shape of the graphs sometimes didn’t come anywhere near the shape of the slide.

Even with my own material, I was pulling together images from several years and projects – manuscripts, conference posters, unpublished stuff – and I was painfully aware that it didn’t fit together very well. As I’ve written about before, consistency matters.

So I redrew everything.

With my own material, this was tedious but straightforward. I just had to locate a lot of archived files on my hard drive, opened them up, and started changing fonts, colours, and proportions.

Making other people’s stuff consistent can be trickier. First, I typically had to grab images. For PDF files, there is a snapshot tool in Adobe Reader that lets you do grabs of anything on the screen. It isn’t turned on in the toolbar by default, though. Click at right to enlarge.

Once I have a grab of the graphic, I can then put it into a full graphics editor (I’m a Corel Photo-Paint user myself; other software packages are available). For instance, I can get rid of text that I don’t need or remove the background. But even PowerPoint can do some basic manipulations quite well.

For some graphs, I need to go right back to ground zero and redraw the graph in my own software. There is a shareware program called Datathief that I’ve used to get extract information from published graphs so I can replot it. It’s fairly simple to use for distinct data points, like scatter plots or bar charts. I haven’t tried to extract a curve yet.

I have heard that data extraction from published graphs is possible in Matlab, though I haven’t done it myself.

In the end, almost every image in my presentation has been altered, tweaked, cropped, redrawn, recoloured, resized, or revised. It took a few solid days to do it. I am convinced it’s worth it, though. The level of harmony in the talk is so much higher, and the overall effect of the presentation is so much stronger, than if I had just left it looking like a scrappy quilt.

Related posts

The Zen of Presentations, Part 41: Consistency

The Zen of Presentations, Part 50: “I hate this topic”

It’s easy to give a talk about your own research. Your own story. Your own project.

What about those times when you have to give a presentation on a topic that... frankly... doesn’t wind your crank? As an instructor, I often have to give presentations on topics that I don’t care about. When I first started here, I had to teach general biology, which included a bunch of material that, to be honest, I had never learned before. The old joke is that in your first semester teaching a class, all you have to be is one lesson ahead of the students.

The path of least resistance is to aim for factual competence. If you’re coming into a subject cold, your first concern is to say things that are correct so you won’t look like an idiot. But “just the facts” doesn’t makes for a compelling presentation. Anyone who wants facts can Google answers faster than you can present them.

Sometimes, people presenting on something they didn’t choose will undercut their own material. They’ll indicate, sometimes explicitly, sometimes through hints, that they don’t like the topic.

Having disdain for your subject is lethal to a presentation. If you signal that this is not important to you, you are signalling that it’s not important to the audience. Which makes it a great big waste of time for all concerned.

Not everyone has the same interests, though. Some people may get something out of it that you don’t. If you respect your audience, at least pretend to have a good time while you’re up there!

But it’s even better if you can go a step beyond getting the facts right and putting on the fake service industry smile.

I once heard an interview with an educator who talked about this problem. He argued that an instructor had to find some sort of personal connection with the material.

The question came up: How do you find a personal connection with, say, the Pythagorean theorem? Trigonometry can be an abstract, bloodless subject.

His answer was to talk about how the ancients calculated the size of the earth. In the city of Syrene, there was a well that the sun shone down directly at noon on a particular day of the year. On the same day in the city of Alexandria, the sun didn’t shine directly overhead. A post would cast a short shadow.

From those two pieces of information, the mathematician Eratosthenes calculated the size of the Earth...

...And came very close to the right answer.

The person being interviewed found this fascinating, and that was his personal connection to this particular bit of geometry. And you can see why: it’s a great story.

“And if you don’t find that personal connection?” asked the interviewer.

“Boredom. Endless boredom.”

I faced a similar problem teaching aerobic respiration, which is soul destroying in the wrong hands. I needed a hook that made presenting it interesting to me. What I eventually hit on was to use a block of chocolate, with six pieces. I tell the students each piece of chocolate represents one carbon atom in a glucose molecule. As we go through the process of turning a sugar molecule into ATP, I break the chocolate down and give each piece (representing carbon in the exhaled carbon dioxide) to a student.

To be honest, I don’t know if having the chocolate model helps the students learn at all. But that wasn’t the point: I do it for me. Because I needed a way to engage with cellular respiration and have fun with it. Because if I’m not engaged, why should I be surprised if my students are not engaged?

There should always be a way to connect with the material. An eloquent person should find no subject sterile.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 49: Buying credibility

Credibility, expertise, mastery of the subject, call it what you will: it consistently weighs heavily in separating great presentations from okay presentations.

True credibility is something you have to build. You have to develop a consistent track record of saying and doing smart things. It's a long, hard road to build that trust.

It's only natural that people look for short cuts.

Beginners and students, acutely aware of their own limitations of experience or knowledge, often to buy credibility. There's two common tricks that people try.

The first is to pull out the swanky clothes. This is not a terrible thing to do, since it usually helps make the speaker feel better and more confident. But if you are with audience members that know you, there might not be that big a bump in credibility. When I teach a seminar class, I can usually tell who is presenting that day, because they're dressed nothing like the way they've dressed in the previous month. Instead of track pants and hoodies, suddenly there are skirts and shirts that might comfortably hold a tie.

The second is to talk in a way that a person normally does not talk. This is nicely spelled out in this post about writing, but it's just as true for presentations (original emphasis):

(S)tudents tend to make the kind of mistakes in the formal research paper that they do not make in informal writing (such as blogs) that the sociolinguist William Labov found among working class speakers aspiring to be middle class: use of the word “whom” in situations where it is ungrammatical but sounds fancy, use of semantically incorrect but pretentious vocabulary (“Thesaurusitis”), longer sentences that lack punch but sound “upper class,” lack of demonstrative language, vague construction that lacks a point (“In this essay it shall be argued that...”).

A student giving a jargon filled talk is reacting much like a blue collar worker trying to fit in with a bunch of suits.

Of course, we know how this turns out. We've read this book and seen this movie: George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and its musical offspring, My Fair Lady. Henry Higgins tries to buy credibility for Eliza Doolittle by teaching her received English. But even as her pronunciation improves, she still gives herself away with every word she says.



You can fool some of the people some of the time when you try to buy credibility. But if the veneer scratches, even a little, things can fall apart almost immediately. This is particularly true in academic settings, where most of the audience has been highly trained to question, pry, be on the lookout for bullshit, find the weakness in the ideas and arguments, and attack any helpless underbelly.

When you try to buy credibility, the price you pay is in your authenticity. And I'd say that's also pretty important in giving a great presentation.

Related links

The Zen of Presentations, Part 37: What makes a good speaker?
Do you like me? Or any scientist?
The Zen of Presentations, Part 29: The shirt on your back

The Zen of Presentations, Part 48: Funny or die?

To hear a lot of people talk, you’d think telling a joke was as deadly as juggling a chainsaw.

Presenters are often told, “Don’t try to be funny.” This is bizarre to me, given that humour is one of the most often cited features of a good presentation. The thinking seems to be that failed humour is a dangerous thing to a speaker. What is at risk when you use humour? People might not laugh.

There’s two responses to that. First, people not laughing is not dangerous. It might deflate your ego a bit. But it’s not as though if a joke lands wrong, it could take your hand clean off!

And if you hadn’t told the joke? People definitely will not laugh. You have the same outcome with or without the joke.

Second, just because people do not laugh out loud at your joke does not necessarily mean they are not enjoying themselves. Sometimes they may just smile. Their smiles may not be big grins. Not everyone in the room may smile. It can be difficult to pick up those cues that people are enjoying the humour, particularly if you’re in a big room, or a dark room, and so on. Even if you’re not getting the audible laughs, you can still have a room full of people who are much more pleased with your presentation than if you didn’t make the effort.

If you tell a joke and it doesn’t work, and you panic, that is not a problem that comes from telling a joke. That is a problem that comes from poor preparation. Lack of preparation can make a talk brittle, and a presenter unable to cope with even slight deviations from plan.

If you’re not comfortable with humour in the sense of telling jokes, think of humour as used in the phrase “good humoured.” Even if you don’t deliberately say funny things, you could at least smile.

Related posts

The Zen of Presentations, Part 5: Legalized insanity
The Zen of Presentations, Part 37: What makes a good speaker?
The Zen of Presentations, Part 38: What you say vs. what they remember

External links

Live notetaking from the “Science humour” session at Science Online 2012 by Perrin Ireland.



Photo by FadderUri on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Hat tip to Christie Wilcox (here and here).

The Zen of Presentations, Part 47: You need a symbologist

The letter “X” is not a multiplication symbol. Not in its uppercase form, and not in its lowercase form, either. The multiplication sign looks like this: ×

A superscript letter “O” is not a degree sign. A degree looks like this: °

A lowercase “u” is not lowercase Greek letter mu, better known as the metric symbol for “micro-”. The micro- symbol looks like this: µ

And we can tell the difference.

If you use Microsoft Office, here’s the part of the ribbon you’re looking for:

Windows users can also open up the Character Map for even more symbols.

One major technical symbol that is missing, and which scientists often want to use, is the mean symbol. It looks like an x with a bar over the top. For some reason, the mean symbol is not in Unicode character sets, or in HTML, as far as I can find.

I have seen these kinds of mistakes in documents, and slides, and posters, many times.

These mistakes show that you don’t know how to use your tools. That is the definition of amateur. And wouldn’t you rather look like a professional than an amateur?

The Zen of Presentations, Part 46: If you say this, you know your talk sucks

There are certain phrases that you never plan to say during a presentation. When talking out loud, though, they can sneak out in a moment of uncontrolled honesty.

Kate Wing nails it:

Scientists - If you have to preface your slide with “you won’t be able to see this” it shouldn't be a slide.

I have often heard some variation of, “This slide isn’t very clear, but...”. If you know that, then why are you forcing me to look at it? Apologizing for a slide might have been acceptable in the days of 35 mm film, where you couldn’t see the results until the film was actually developed. But we are living in the digital age, where high quality previews are immediate and photo editing software is everywhere.

You should always show the best image possible. Sometimes, that best image might not be so hot, but you should say, “This is the best available image.” Because that tells the audience that you respect their attention, and you put in your best effort to track down or make the clearest graphic you could.

Another phrase to listen for is, “This slide is to remind me to tell you...”

No! Slides are not for reminding yourself of what you want to say. Notes are to remind you what you want to say. Teleprompters are to remind you what you want to say. Rehearsal is to make it so you don’t need reminders at all.

If you hear phrases like these coming out of your mouth, you know it’s time to change your talk.

Never apologize, never explain.

Picture by Andrew Coulter Enright on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 45: Down in front

You often have to give presentations in rooms where the floors are flat, the room is full, and the projection screens are always too low.

This was a curse at the recent Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting. The screens were too low in many of the rooms, and people noticed and remarked upon it.

I knew this... and I blew it.

Because the organizers of the conference were adamant that presentations needed to be able to run in PowerPoint 1997 format, I actually ended up with multiple versions of my slides. I had one done in PowerPoint 2010 with some of the graphic effects and typefaces I wanted.

In retrospect, I was stupid to show this slide. About 20 percent of the slide is taken up with the title, pushing the image, which is what I want people to see, further down so it’s more likely to be blocked by someone’s head.

I had another that was PowerPoint 1997 compatible, with almost no text, because I was not sure if the fonts would show correctly, as not every computer has the same fonts installed. I should have used that one, because the slide would have looked more like this:

The image is bigger, and shows more of what I wanted people to see. I’d okay with the first one if I knew I was in a room with stadium seating and everyone having clear eye-lines. But I wasn’t.

Sadly, you can probably only count on the top half, or maybe two thirds, of your slides being consistently and clearly visible to all. Don’t put anything important in that bottom half or third; someone might not be able to see it. Better to start a new slide and put it at the top.

Screen photo by ChrisM70 on Flickr; crayfish photo in slides by Mike Bok on Flickr; both used under a Creative Commons license.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 44: The language barrier

One of the most common pieces of advice for people giving a presentation is to get rid of almost all the text on the slides. There is quite a bit of research backing up this up.

There is one case where I would make an exception.

If you are speaking in your second language, have an accent, or some problem with your speech where people might misunderstand you, you might want to keep some of the text. More than if you and the audience are both fluent native speakers of the language, at any rate.

You don’t need to write out every line as a bullet point and read it, like so many people fall back on. But you probably want to have a few key phrases spelled out in text. In particular, it can be helpful to spell out somewhere on a slide any technical words or phrases that people might not be used to hearing.

For example, I spent much of a semester in an undergraduate genetics class trying to figure out what a doughnut trait was. I finally realized that the instructor was talking about a dominant trait.

While people might be slightly annoyed by the amount of text, annoyance or boredom is always better than confusion.

Just to round this out...

What American accent do you have? Your Result: North Central   "North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
The West
The Midland
Boston
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

External links

American translation: Dr. Doyenne describes how she prepared a presentation when her audience was not fluent with the language she was speaking. Excellent post, and the inspiration for this one.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 43: Not our best work

Today’s post is for students heading to their fall classes, whether for the first time or not.

Over the course of your career as a student, you are going to listen to a lot of lectures. You’ll definitely see that some lecturers are better than others.

In universities, you may be lucky enough to have some professors who are world famous for their scholarship; people at the absolute top of their professional game.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, you may well be influenced by the style of lecturers. That might affect how you give presentations, either in class or elsewhere.

Don’t make that mistake.

A university instructor has two or three different classes a semester. For each class, that instructor has three hours of class time per week, for a total of six to nine hours of stuff every week. Let’s say eight hours, for the sake of argument.

The key to great presentations is practice. I consider at least two “out loud” run throughs before the actual presentation to be my bare, scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel minimum for conference presentations. Hundreds of hours of work go into every Apple keynote, for which they are rightly praised.

Rehearsing each lecture twice would require 24 hours of rehearsal and lecture time a week. And remember, we still haven’t added in time needed research what the information to put on those slides, or the time spent organizing the information in a coherent way for students, never mind everything besides lectures that instructors have to do.

Because of the lack of rehearsal, it’s almost necessary to use your slides as notes. Lecturers are routinely guilty of “reading each bullet point aloud as it come up” style of presenting because of this.

When I’m lecturing, it’s not my best work as a presenter. It can’t be. There’s too much stuff and not enough time.

Students, don’t think that lectures are good examples of what to do presentations. Even the best instructors compromise on presentation practices to get the lectures done.

Picture by thekennelclub on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 42: Outlines must die

Outline slides are a waste of time. By definition, they contain no information that will not be found somewhere else in the talk. Worse, people usually narrate those slides, tediously plodding through each point.

For scientific talks, outlines are even more useless because almost every talk has the same structure. People structure their talks the same way they structure their scientific papers: Introduction. Methods. Results. Discussion. If your outline isn’t substantially different than that, leave it out. Putting an outline up with those headings advertises your lack of imagination.

Why be redundant? Why repeat yourself? Why say the same thing over and over again?

Yet not only do I regularly see these sinkholes when I attend scientific conferences, some of my colleagues insist their students include them.

An outline is a planning tool. Outlines are useful in preparing a talk. You don’t need to show it once the planning is over, however. You don’t need to see an outline for a talk any more than you need to see the blueprints for a building you’re walking around in. You don’t need to see the storyboards for a movie you’re watching. You don’t need to see the rough sketches of a painting.

The problem might be that instructors want students to have a plan for their talk, which is a useful thing to teach them. The easiest way for instructors to ensure that happens is to make students “show their work” by including an outline slide. This forces the student to plan, which is good. This is less work for the instructor, because he or she can just tick it off during the presentation. But the cost is the student has learned a horrible habit that makes nobody else in the audience happy.

My colleagues are great, but sometimes I’d like to give ‘em such a smack.

Related rants

The Zen of Presentations, Part 31: Redundant and repetitive

Picture by andersabrahamsson on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 41: Consistency

I spend a fair amount of time reviewing students’ PowerPoint presentations. The thing I probably spend the most time fixing is not their science, but their friggin’ lists of bullet points.^*

I often see bulleted lists like this:

• Readers distracted by content of a page when looking at its layout.
• Lorem Ipsum Looks Like Readable English.
• Now default for desktop publisher and web page editors

Two points have sentence casing; one has headline casing. Two have periods; one does not. For a list of short points, it doesn’t matter if you put a period at the end of each point or not. But could you at least do it consistently?

To make matters worse, people often end up changing typefaces without realizing it. And point size. And sometimes colours. Longer pieces of text will be ragged right on one slide and justified on the next.

Consistency becomes harder as you add more slides. I often see a series of slides with the title containing some abbreviation of “continued”. But sometimes it will be “Con’t”, sometimes “cont”, then “Con’t.”, followed by “(con't)”. I think I have seen every permutation of four letters and punctuation marks that it is possible to make.

Maintaining consistency becomes downright treacherous when you are creating presentations with several pieces of software. For instance, you might use Verdana as a typeface throughout your PowerPoint slides... but then forget that your Excel chart has the axes labelled in Arial.

Does anyone notice? For scientific or technical presentations, the answer is almost certainly, “Yes.” The audience is going to be filled with people whose livelihood depends on obsessing over details.

You want your audience to believe that you are someone who cares about details. Being consistent in your typography and slide design shows you are paying attention.

Pick a style and stay with it!

^* I try to tell them to get rid of all those damn lists that everyone hates, but they’re all too scared. Wusses.

Photo by britl on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 40: Lighting a fire under speakers

Ignite! talks rock.

We have a seminar class in my department, which all our majors must take. Normally, this class meets an hour a week, and every student gives one 15 minute talk, with 5-10 minutes for questions.

The problem is, each presentation becomes very high stakes, with no opportunity to try again. If you screw up once, you’re done. I wanted to give everyone a second crack at giving a talk, so I decided to have everyone do two talks: a 12-15 minute one, and an Ignite! talk.

The Ignite! format: You have five minutes flat. 20 slides, auto-timed for 15 second each. Then you sit down and shut up. Somewhere I saw the Ignite! motto was something like, “Enlighten us, but make it snappy.”

Across the board, my students’ Ignite! talks were head and shoulders above their long talks.

When I said this on the last day of class, I say a lot of heads nodding in agreement. So it wasn’t just me; many people thought these talks were better.

There were many differences between the long and Ignite! talks. For the long talks, I banned PowerPoint and I picked the topic (these were both intended to push students out of their comfort zone). But I don’t think those were why the Ignite! talks were better.

They were better because of the energy everyone brought to their talks.

Faced with 15 second per slide, people had to know their story, had to concentrate, and absolutely no dawdling! That meant every speaker had to crank it up, and it was so much more fun to watch overall.

And even if it wasn’t great, you knew you wouldn’t be stuck listening to a crummy talk for more than a few minutes.

Not only am I sold on the value of doing these for my students, I would love to see more academic conferences try Ignite! sessions. You can get a surprising amount of information out there in five minutes if you plan it right. It could leave a lot more time for the things that people like the most, which are the meetings in the hallways and over coffee.

If you haven’t done one, try it! The format lives up to its name.

External links

Presentation Zen: The Ignite presentation method
Speaking about Presenting: The fastest Way to create an Ignite presentation (several students told me this was very useful to them)

The Zen of Presentations, Part 39: Unsaid

This is probably the most effective short presentation I’ve seen in a long time.

Unfortunately, I can’t embed the video here. But what you will see if you click the link above is American Congressman Joseph Crowley confronting the House of Repesentatives with nothing but an easel pad. (The clip is less than 90 seconds, so don’t be put off!)

He says nothing. But the expression on his face shows that he means every word he doesn’t say.

It’s powerful.

In a presentation, there is an almost overwhelming urge to fill up every second with your words. It’s easy to forget the power of silence. It’s as Claude Debussy said:

Music is the space between the notes.

A well placed pause can give emphasis. It can give someone the few second they need for something to sink in.

Sometimes, it’s better to shut the hell up.

Additional: Found a version of the video that can be embedded, though the linked version looks better.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 38: What you say vs. what they remember

What you say and what people remember can differ.

Case in point.

The January 2011 American State of the Union address, actual words used:

The January 2011 American State of the Union address, perceived (according to listeners of National Public Radio, so not a random sample of listeners):

I did not watch this particular speech as it aired. But this pattern so striking that I decided to go back and watch the thing to try to figure out what the heck was accounting for this difference. Besides, I had decided to pull an all-nighter anyway, because I had a ridiculously early wake-up time for a trip. So I had time to kill, and I listened.

I was expecting the salmon reference to come at the very beginning or near the end, because of the primacy and recency effects in memory. I was surprised to see it fairly solidly in the middle of the talk. I do think that the reason education looms large as the largest specific topic (rather than general impressions like “hopeful”) is that it was at the beginning of the talk.

What didn’t surprise me was that “salmon” was being used in a joke:

We live and do business in the Information Age, but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the age of black-and-white TV. There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different agencies that deal with housing policy. Then there’s my favorite example: The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. (Laughter.) I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked. (Laughter and applause.)

That this example stuck is a great testament to the power of humour. The word “salmon” appears exactly once in the entire speech. Teachers who have to do a lot of lectures may find that their students might not remember the thing they were supposed to learn, but they will remember the jokes.

But why that one? It certainly wasn’t the only joke in the speech. The transcript indicates “(Laughter.)” at least five other times.

And for me, the salmon wasn’t even the funniest joke in the speech. I thought his comment about high-speed trains was better:

For some trips, it will be faster than flying – without the pat-down.

So why did this joke stick so much more than the others? Some time ago, I wrote:

One caveat on using humour during a presentation. Don’t just tell a joke just to make a joke. Tell a joke to make a point. The humour should relate to the material.

While I smiled more at the pat-down line, it wasn’t making a point about high-speed rail; more a passing reference to the inconvenience of air travel. The whole anecdote about salmon exemplified the bigger issue about bureaucratic structure.

The moral of the story is to make sure your humour serves your main point. Humour is so powerful, so memorable, it can detract from your main point rather than enhancing it if you’re not careful.

I guess it was too much to hope that the U.S. President gave a speech all about how the future of American was ichthyology.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 37: What makes a good speaker?

When I teach a seminar class, I start off by asking the students to name a speaker they have seen who gave a great presentation, and describe what made it memorable. As they go, I write down the things they mention as why this presentation was so good.

I might not end up with exactly the same words every time, but the concepts listed are consistent. The last time I did this, this was written on the board at the end of the class:

• Empathy.
• Simplicity.
• Humour.
• Feeling like the speaker was talking to you specifically.
• Confidence.
• Mastery of the material.
• Energy.
• Engagement.
• Emotional.
• Credible.
• Stories.
• Surprise.
• Sincere.
• Different perspective.
• Passionate.

What I find interesting is that people are so reluctant to do the things as a speaker that they themselves just told me that they enjoy as an audience member.

Humour is the most obvious example. My students consistently bring it up as something good speakers do. But I’ve sat through an uncounted number of student talks without any hint of an attempt at humour.

I suppose that the reason people don’t do these things is that underlying many of the concepts on that list are risk and hard work.

You take a risk when you tell a joke. People might not laugh.

You take a risk when you try to get people to empathize. You have to expose what you think and feel.

And there are no short cuts to mastering the material or establishing credibility.

This time, a few specific talks got mentioned, including Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s conversation with Richard Dawkins on The Poetry of Science (not really a presentation in the usual sense). One person mentioned Isabelle Allende. You can see her here on TED, though I don’t think this was the particular talk the student had seen. Garr Reynolds comments on her talk here. So it’s getting easier and easier for these best presentations to spread now that online video is finally ubiquitous.

Still, many people mentioned people they knew personally; preachers or pastors came up several times this session. Good presenters are everywhere, and don’t need a million hits on YouTube to make an impression and make a difference.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 36: Prezi

“I only have about six months where this will be really cool, and then everyone else will discover it.”

I thought that about Prezi over a year ago.

This summer, I went to two conferences in three weeks. And I was somewhat appalled by the complete dominance of PowerPoint – for posters as well as presentations. Of all the talks I saw at two conferences, the talk I gave at the International Association of Astacology meeting was the only one that didn’t use PowerPoint.

I used Prezi instead. It was only the second time I’d done so. But like the first time, people were slightly in awe. “How did you get PowerPoint to do all that zooming?” they asked.

I’d smile and reply, “Simple. I didn’t use PowerPoint.”

PowerPoint emulates 35 mm slides: a series of individual images, one after another. PowerPoint has allowed animation of the images, but you’re still basically using the computer as a fancy slide carousel.

Prezi emulates a whiteboard: you get one surface to play on. But it escapes some of the limitations of the medium by combining the whiteboard with a magnifying glass, allowing you to zoom in and out to particular locations at your pleasure.

Why have I only used Prezi twice, when I’ve gotten such a “Wow” response? Because it’s not right for every job. Even experts like Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte (replying to Garr on Facebook) seem to be trying to figure whether or not there are any real advantages to using Prezi over other media. There is, as far as I know, just one book about using Prezi – and it’s in Dutch. (Which is great for them, but not so hot for me.)

What sets Prezi apart from PowerPoint (or most other techniques) is the zooming. I’ve seen zooming used two ways.

Some use zooming as a fancy transition that PowerPoint doesn’t have. It’s a wasted opportunity, and such presentations are often called “dizzying.”

Where Prezi starts to rock is when you use it to show whole / part relationships. In other words, you’re zooming in and out of a single thing as though you had a physical camera that zooms in on a part of a larger object, or pulls back and reveals something is just a piece in a larger puzzle.

Here’s one we did earlier, as they used to say on the cooking shows.

Prezi demo 1: Zen’s journey on Prezi

This kind of story works extremely well in Prezi. The map ties it all together, and gives everything a spatial context. You can see how big a move going to McGill in eastern Canada was compared to going to grad school, for instance. I couldn’t tell the story as effectively in PowerPoint.

I’ve learned, though, to try to make each individual step rather small. If you go from a long way out to a long way in in one step, you will rightfully earn the “dizzying” label. Here’s another version that zooms straight from one place to another.

Prezi demo 2: Zen's dizzy on Prezi

I don’t think it’s as effective as the one above it. Of course, both could be improved if I had higher resolution maps, but as “proof of concept” demos, they work well enough.

In the first example, notice that I don’t jump from Lethbridge to Killarney to the University of Victoria. I pull out from one some distance, in steps, before I start to zoom in to the other. In the second, I go straight from one location to the next. You don’t get as strong a sense of the context as the first one. (I think Prezi may have been optimizing their zooming rates; this one doesn’t seem to race from location to location as fast as I thought I have seen before. But maybe I’m imagining things.)

In biology, I can think of lots of different examples where Prezi would be fantastic at showing whole / part relationships.

• Starting from a whole organism, zoom down to tissues, then specific cells, then maybe even molecules. (We biologists are always obsessing about “levels of analysis.”)
• Showing relationships between organisms in phylogenetic trees. You can show the entire tree, then look at particular clades, and individual species within a clade.
• Timelines. I could imagine some very cool things you could do with geological time.
• Ecosystems and food webs.

Prezi is not a PowerPoint killer. There are many kinds of stories that don’t have any spatial relationships, and Prezi’s only advantage is novelty. As more people discover Prezi, that advantage will wear off. But for cases where you have a story that does have some spatial elements, Prezi is unmatched.

Related posts

No more slidesters, interlude: Making presentations more like posters

Rhett Allain has a nice list of Prezi pros and cons. Ed Yong mentions that the lack of slides allow him to change things on the fly more than PowerPoint. And Ted Curator Chris Anderson does a great talk using Prezi.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 35: Another presentation book you must own

Almost two years ago, I gushed over Nancy Duarte’s book, Slide:ology. She has now written her first book, Resonate.

Yes, you read right. Her second book came out two years ago. Sort of like how the first Star Wars movies came out a couple of decades after the later films.

Duarte describes Resonate as the prequel to Slide:ology. And she’s right. Resonate is the one to read first, because it is about the reason for giving a presentation: to change people’s minds, to persuade, to take action. In contrast, Slide:ology is more about design of visuals: the things that you work on once you’ve know what you want to talk about.

At the core of Resonate is her thesis that all good presentations have a common structure. Great presentations start with “the way it is.” Then, they make repeated contrasts between “the way it is” and “the way it could be.” Finally, great presentations end with a call to action, and a promise that new, greater things are possible.

It’s simple, but don’t dare think for a second that it’s stupid. Scientists will probably appreciate the repeated analysis that Duarte has done to show that this structure is variable and rich. It’s similar to how stories can follow the same basic plot structure, but differ profoundly in almost every other way.

Another unexpected inversion is in how Duarte conceives of the importance of story. She has something more in mind than anecdotes or telling a narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The presenter’s role is not to be someone like Sherlock Holmes, who unravels the plot and explains it to Inspector Lestrade (the audience). If I may jump genres...

The presenter’s role is to be Ben Kenobi. ^*

It takes a little while to get used to this view. At first, it’s somewhat paradoxical to think of the person given a presentation as a supporting character. After all, this sort of character is not usually the most popular one in the movie. Everyone wants to be the central character. You are not.

These short summaries do not to the justice to the richness of these concepts, and there are many more besides. She talks at length about her work process for developing presentations, and how to persuade people (taking some cues from Randy Olson along the way), for instance.

Duarte has again written a deep book. Wonderful.

Related pages

Book website

^* Duarte herself uses a different example from the Star Wars series, but I think Ben is a little closer to the part of the presenter than the example she uses.