Presentation sins

I've sat through a lot of presentations in my time. Literally hundreds of hours of lectures, dozens of hours of student presentation, both as a student, and as a lecturer. I've listened to fellow PhD students and masters students present, and I've listened through several conferences.

Some people are naturally good. They tell you a story. When they speak, you feel as though they are having a conversation with you, even though there might be hundreds of other people in a room.

Other people aren't particularly naturally talented at speaking, but they avoid most of the major presentation sins and generally do a decent job. They explain their points reasonably well, keep mostly to the topic and within the time constraints. It's not riveting stuff, but it's enough to hold people's attention. Most competent lecturers fall into this category, which is where I'd like to think I am.

I'd guess about 5% of the speakers I've heard fall into the first category, and up to 45% into the second. Sadly, that means that half of the presentations I've sat through were utter crap.

Here are some of the major presentations sins I've experienced:

Reading the slides. Nothing on earth is more boring than a speaker just reading out the powerpoint slides. Reading prepared notes that are a slightly expanded version of the slides is only marginally better, especially because the speaker usually ends up reading in a monotone. It's wooden and dull, and boring as hell. The audience is so unstimulated that our attention just wanders off to other things, like counting the holes in the ceiling tiles.

Impenetrable voice. Some people have a voice that is hard to understand. It may be because of a heavy accent, gross overuse of umm and aah, grating vocal cords, or just because they mumble. It requires huge mental effort for the audience to just follow the conversation, and unless we have a very compelling reason to do so, we just won't.

Rambling. Some speakers find it impossible to stick to the topic for more than 3 seconds at a time. They inject personal anecdotes, reminisences or urban legends, or just let every random inane thought that passes through their brain escape out their mouth. Sometimes we might find it interesting, but mostly it's just a waste of everyone's time, and us audience members are going to feel cheated.

Trying to cover too much. Now, I can run anywhere between 8 and 30 slides an hour, depending on the exact nature of what I am presenting, but 30 slides an hour is my absolute limit. I have been in presentations that were supposed to be 15 minutes long, where the presenter had over 40 slides. Most people speak faster when they are nervous, but even allowing for that, some presenters try to race through about twice or three times the amount they can realistically cover. This is especially bad when combined with the next sin.

Inability to stick to the time limit. Bad speakers tend to speak too long about one aspect and run out of time for something else. At one presentation I attended, a guy had 24 slides for a 10 minute presentation. After 8 minutes, he was still on slide 4. He was given his two-minute warning, and asked to just skip to the most important aspects (many slides away yet) but he continued going through the slide at the same laborious pace. When his time was up, he was asked to wrap it up, but he continued at the same laborious pace. Two minutes later, he was told he was over time and asked to finish, but he continued at the same laborious pace. Finally, after he'd gone about 5 minutes over (and was still only on about slide 8 of 24), he was basically interrupted and shunted off the stage to make way for the next person.

The ability to respond to changing conditions and adjust the presentation on the fly, whether because of time limit, audience reaction, or some external change, is one of the things that really distinguishes a good presenter from a mediocre one.