Image by flickr user kbaird, used under a creative commons license.

When a speaker switches to a new, wordy slide, what happens?  The audience reads the words. They can’t help it.  This is what my wife calls the “Cereal Box effect”: if a cereal box is on the kitchen table, you’ll read the words printed on it.  In all of human history, nothing interesting has ever been printed on a cereal box. But you’ll read it, because it’s words in front of you.

Now, with the wordy slide projected, the speaker starts talking.  Maybe he summarizes the words, maybe he reads the words to the audience (yawn.)  In any case, the audience only half-listens, because they’re reading. E. Tufte discusses this divided attention in his screed against powerpoint. Of course we’re bright people who can talk, listen, and chew gum at the same time — but with divided attention.

Next time you see a wordy slide, watch your colleagues.  Where are their eyes? Reading the slide, or watching the speaker?

A creator of divided attention is the ubiquitous slide showing a key plot on the left, and bullet points on the right.  The audience happily divides its attention among the plot (often illegibly small), the bullet points, and the speaker….

Maybe the next slide re-engages the audience, but often, the audience starts fiddling, reading, staring — the speaker’s lost them.  In addition, I suspect this format helps an audience underestimate the speaker, especially (a hunch) when the speaker is junior and/or female.  After all, the speaker didn’t inform the audience — the bullet points did!

What to do instead?

* Suppose there’s a quotation you want your audience to ponder.  Fine. Tell them, “I think Zwicky said it best,” then bring up the quotation. Be quiet and let them read it. Watch their eyes to see when they finish reading and turn back to you. Carry on.  (If there are visually impaired people in the audience, you should modify this method to keep them included.)

* Make terse slides. Instead of the half-plot, half-bullet slide, try filling the screen with the plot, such that the only words on the page are the axes and a slide title. Then, explain the plot.

* Say you move to a busy slide, but you realize you need to explain something first. Hit the “b” key to get a black screen, make your explanation, then return to the busy slide.  (This works in Keynote or Powerpoint). The “w” key gives a white screen.

* Figure out why you want wordy slides.  Are you afraid you’ll forget what to say?  That’s not good –  words chosen as a crutch for the speaker aren’t words aimed to inform an audience.  Next time, I’ll show how to use Presenter Notes in Keynote or Powerpoint, so that the audience sees clear, uncluttered slides, while you the speaker see all the cues, hints, and reminders you want.

Here’s another guest post! This one is contributed by Mark Marley, a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center working on modeling the atmospheres of planets and brown dwarfs.

You’ve been invited to give a talk at a workshop that will lead to a new spacecraft instrument proposal in Europe, but your spouse is leaving town the day of the meeting and someone has to get the kids to school. Facing this dilemma this week led to my first ever experience giving a remote science talk. Experience with video conferences for things like committee meetings, remote observing, and panel reviews really didn’t provide as much relevant experience as I first thought. There are a number of considerations unique to giving a talk to a camera lens while your virtual audience sits 9 time zones and 6000 miles away. I felt my first stab at this was acceptable, but the experience left me wondering about how to do it better next time. In that vein I’ll share my experience and I hope anyone who has given or listened to a remote talk will add their suggestions.

The Setup

First I’ll say a few words about the setup. Our conference room has a Polycom video system that was clearly installed with committee meetings in mind. The camera, sitting atop a big TV, looks down at a large conference table. This normally would allow a remote participant to see everyone in the room during a committee meeting, for example, but provides an odd perspective for a talk. I think next time I would move the video equipment to a separate spot that provides a friendlier, less detached view.

Stand or Sit? Zoomed in or Out?

This leads to a second perspective issue, should I stand or sit? A quick pre-talk poll of two friends who had each done this once found one vote for each option. Thinking that standing would be awkward, I chose to sit and framed the video to show me at the table, anchor man style. Certainly you wouldn’t want to zoom in too tightly, lest you look like the “1984″ Macintosh ad But I’m thinking I was probably a bit too pulled back, reducing my face to a small fraction of the screen. I also wonder if standing, with the video zoomed in to show upper body and arms, wouldn’t be a better choice.

Where to Look?

As I spoke the remote system played my presentation back on the TV at my location, while the audience saw both my presentation on the main screen and a smaller side video of me. Thus there were none of the usual audience cues for me as a speaker and despite my best intentions, I think I ended up speaking to the charts on the TV more often than the looming camera. Next time I’ll bring a stuffed animal or a bright sign to place by the camera to provide an extra cue to smile and look at the “audience”.

No Pointer!

It goes without saying that the presentation slides themselves need to be clear and self-explanatory (as they should be regardless). As there was no remote pointer I used lots of bright red lines, arrows, and labels to point out key features of graphs and images.

Until we get closer to routine Avatar style 3D presentations, I don’t think there is any way that a remote talk can be as effective as an in person one (but has anyone ever attended one of the motivational speaker events hyped by Donald Trump?). Any ideas for what works well? Has anyone used a more modern setup with better presenter tools?

In advance of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC next week, we need to talk about Twitter. Twitter is a great platform for sharing and navigating the craziness that will be this huge meeting. As far as I can tell, many astro outreach folks are on twitter, but not many scientists (except those with blogs). For the purposes of this meeting, this should change. It would be awesome if people tweeted about the science going on at the meeting to help people find/not miss what they are most interested in, but also to help people find out about exciting things going on outside their own subfield.

Examples of useful tweets would be: a talk your looking forward to, along with a time and room; big results you just found out about; and posters that should not be missed, along with landmarks (e.g., back right corner, across from the Spitzer booth). Other useful things for talk hoppers would be letting people know about schedule changes and how many minutes behind a session is.

The way this works is to just include the hash tag ‘#aas215′ in all your AAS tweets and anybody, even folks without twitter accounts, can see them: http://twitter.com/search?q=#aas215.

While a lot of us will have our laptops, the beauty of Twitter is that it’s super easy to use on mobile devices. So, I’m given AAS attendees an assignment: sign up for a twitter account (optional), set up a twitter app on your mobile device (I use Tweetie on my iPhone), and learn how to save a search term (#aas215).

Looking forward to reading your tweets!
http://twitter.com/kellecruz

Blogger Seth Godin reminds us that presentations are a precious opportunity to change minds. To translate his advice to a scientific context, I’d make the following two substitutions:

• “emotional pictures”  —> “screen-filling, well-explained, compelling plots”
• “to change minds”   —> “to educate”.

Godin partially echoes Edward Tufte’s argument that slideware is a terrible way to share information. Which is precisely why we publish papers, not powerpoint slides, in scientific journals.

However, while experts will read your papers, most astronomers never will.    They may, however, attend your 50 minute scientific talk.  Given that this is how we communicate with each other, how can each of us make our talks more informative, interesting, and understandable?  What resources are you using?  What strategies have you adopted?  What terrible techniques would you like to kvetch about?

Zen Habits is a great blog for folks who want to be both insanely productive and ridiculously happy. He has a nice article on how to accept criticism with grace and appreciation that applies really well to fielding questions during presentations and responding to referee reports.

Here’s the summary:

• Stop your first Reaction: Cool Off, Take a Breath
• Turn a Negative into a Positive
• Thank the Critic
• Learn from the Criticism
• Be the Better Person

Read the full article: How to Accept Criticism with Grace and Appreciation [Zen Habits]