by Jay Lund
1. The title should be packed with obscure acronyms that give no clue of the subject. An exciting talk might disturb the audience’s ability to relax, look at their phones, or quietly work in the back of the room.
2. Introduce each co-author with long-winded and complete backgrounds. Their lives and accomplishments are of more interest to the audience than your work.
3. Omit a brief outline of the train of thought that you are hoping to impart to the audience. This makes it easier for the audience to get lost and return to looking at their phones.
4. At the beginning, do not concisely define the problem and the major insights you have found. Everyone loves a mystery.
5. Do not briefly place your work in the context of other past and ongoing work.
6. Do not make the point of each slide clear in its heading line.
7. Use as many acronyms as possible. You get extra points for obscure acronyms unfamiliar to the audience.
8. Make figures and tables unreadable for the back of the room. Making graphics and tables small allows more room for pretty pictures, extraneous text, and blank space, and makes it hard for the audience to understand, scrutinize and question the material.
9. Provide ALL detailed assumptions used in your analysis on slides, so your presentation is complete. Do not provide access to your most recent report with details.
10. Because so many points are important, please use small fonts so the audience can be exposed to everything. Make opera glasses trendy again!
11. Do not use formatting to ease text reading or accompany text with relevant figures.
12. Do not add circles, arrows, or text to figures or tables that highlight important insights or distinguish interesting results from less interesting results.
13. Do not limit your summary slide to the most important points. Include all 47 points in the summary to prevent the audience from focusing on any major accomplishments.
14. Do not conclude with the major insights from your study.
15. Do not briefly state the importance of a few next steps that would be most useful for the problem.
16. Replace the “Questions?” sunset slide with a bright sunrise and the words “WAKE UP! I’m done! Wake up!”, perhaps accompanied by an alarm or Microsoft shutdown sound.
Jay Lund is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California – Davis. Having endured many terrible talks, and given a few, he is an expert on the subject. This blog post is inspired by a similar piece distributed by the American Geophysical Union in the 1980s. Life is better with fewer boring talks.
Further reading
“Guidelines for Giving a Truly Terrible Talk”, IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, Vol. NS-33, No. 4, August 1986 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=4334541
Guidelines for Giving a Truly Terrible Talk! -adapted from the American Geophysical Union https://glaciers.pdx.edu/fountain/Advice_SpeakingWriting/TrulyTerribleTalk.html
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