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"Guidelines for giving a truly terrible talk"

Guidelines for giving a truly terrible talk

Følgende muntre "tips" er hentet fra en veiledning kalt "35-mm Slides: A Manual for Technical Presentations", av Dan Pratt og Lev Ropes.

"Strict adherence to the following time-tested guidelines will ensure that both you and your work remain obscure and will guarantee an audience of minimum size at your next talk. Continuity of effort may result in being awarded the coveted 5:00 P.M. Friday speaking time at the next national meeting."

Slides:

1. Use lots of slides. A rule of thumb is one slide for each 10 seconds of time allotted for your talk. If you don’t have enough, borrow the rest from the previous speaker, or cycle back and forth between slides.
2. Put as much information on each slide as possible. Graphs with a dozen or so crossing lines, tables with at least 100 entries, and maps with 20 or 30 units are especially effective; but equations, particularly if the contain at least 15 terms and 20 variables, are almost as good. A high density of detailed and marginally relevant data usually prevents penetrating questions from the audience.
3. Use small print. Anyone who has not had the foresight to either sit in the front row or bring a set of binoculars is probably not smart enough to understand your talk anyway.
4. Use figures and tables directly from publications. They will help you accomplish goals 2 and 3 above and minimize the amount of preparation for the talk. If you haven’t published the work, use illustrations from an old publication. Only a few people in the audience will notice anyway.

Presentation:

1. Don’t organize your talk in advance. It is usually best not to even think about it until your name has been announced by the session chair. Above all, don’t write the talk out, it may fall into enemy hands.
2. Never, ever, rehearse, even briefly. Talks are best when they arise spontaneously and in random order. Leave it as an exercise for the listener to assemble your thoughts properly and make some sense out of what you say.
3. Discuss each slide in complete detail, especially those parts irrelevant to the main points of our talk. If you suspect that there is anyone in the audience who is not asleep, return to a previous slide and discuss it again.
4. Face the projection screen, mumble, and talk as fast as possible, especially while making important points. An alternative strategy is to speak very slowly, leave every other sentence uncompleted, and punctuate each thought with "ahhh", "unhh", or something equally informative.
5. Wave the lights pointer around the room, or at least move the beam rapidly about the slide image in small circles. If this is done properly, it will make 50 % of the people in the front three rows (and those with binoculars) sick.
6. Use up all of your allotted time and at least half, if not all, of the next speaker’s. This avoids foolish and annoying questions and forces the chairman to ride herd on the following speakers. Remember, the rest of the speakers don’t have anything important to say anyway. If they had, they would have been assigned times earlier than yours.