Tempo and Mode of Presentations

He lectured on the Cavern of Torquay, the now famous Kent's Cavern. He paced like a Franciscan Preacher up and down behind a long show-case, up two steps, in a room in the old Clarendon. He had in his hand a huge hyena's skull. He suddenly dashed down the steps-- rushed, skull in hand, at the first undergraduate on the front bench--and shouted, 'What rules the world ?' The youth, terrified, threw himself against the next back seat, and answered not a word. He rushed then on me, pointing the hyena full in my face--' What rules the world ?' 'Haven't an idea,' I said. ' The stomach, sir,' he cried (again mounting his rostrum), ' rules the world. The great ones eat the less, and the less the lesser still.' "

[Henry Acland's description of one of William Buckland's lectures. From The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland]

We've all sat through bad presentations at one time or another. Presentations where people speak too fast, too slow, heap on the jargon, or treat PowerPoint as if it were NotePad are unfortunately common, and it appears that being a good public speaker is a rare talent. This past Friday, for instance, I sat through a number of presentations that I could not make heads nor tails of. The slides looked pretty, sure, but I was often baffled by what I was supposed to be looking at because the explanations were poor. Must presentations always be this way? Thankfully not, and Jennifer Ouellette has recently posted an outstanding essay about the art of public speaking.

Anyone who is going to stand before a crowd and speak is going to require preparation, practice, and some constructive criticism. It's incorrect to assume that if someone is an expert on a particular topic than they must be able to pontificate at length about it effectively, although some people are going to require more practice at communicating effectively than others. In terms of science specifically, scientists are often seen as dull and boring, idly standing behind a podium and droning on and on about words that no one but a handful of people in the room understand. In some cases this is true, in others it is not, but I think anyone who is going to speak before an audience can take a few lessons from theater.

While the content of a play and the content of a scientific presentation are quite different, the way you prepare for one closely mirrors how you prepare for the other. Rehearsal is required, knowing your "lines" and how to best deliver them to your intended audience. An actor might have more occasion to use body language, but anyone using .ppt slides is also trying to convey information visually, and there's no excuse to stick a bunch of blocky black letters on a stark white background anymore. Computers are powerful tools that can be used in so many different ways (especially in terms of animating slides to highlight certain information), and it's a shame that many people treat programs like PowerPoint as nothing more than a digital notecard presenter.

Audiences will vary, of course, but there's nothing wrong with a little showmanship. While it might not be appropriate to leap off the stage towards the nearest conference attendee with a carnivore skull like William Buckland (see the quote above), speakers do not have to be anchored to the podium, either. Podiums might provide something of a safe haven (especially if you think the rotten tomatoes are going to start flying), but I have never felt especially comfortable being forced to stand behind them. They're useful to hold papers or a computer, but freedom of movement is more important to me when I'm speaking to an audience. If I just stood at the podium, looking down at my papers and reading them off (with the same globs of text on the slide), I would probably put everyone to sleep. If what I have to say really is important and is something to get excited about, then it should be expressed as such.

Buckland certainly was an eccentric and was even considered "vulgar" by Charles Darwin, but I've always appreciated his sense of showmanship. Coattails have gone out of fashion (and therefore we're unlikely to see paleontologists grabbing them and flapping them to simulate the wings of pterosaurs), but I think there are some scientists who do understand how to make their ideas exciting. This past week I interviewed Robert Bakker, a famous paleontologist well known for his engaging manner. Unfortunately embedding of the video has been disabled, but click here to see a clip from an old NOVA documentary featuring Bakker describing the features of a Tyrannosaurus skull.* If you'll watch the video, you'll see that Bakker doesn't need any special effects or mechanical monsters to bring the dinosaur to life. By focusing on what many people find most fascinating about the animal (the destructive power of one of the largest predators to ever live), Bakker is able to point out all the important features of the skull that made Tyrannosaurus so frightening and still impresses us now.

Every discipline has different challenges, though, and not every field can enjoy the attention an audience pays to the remains of extinct "monsters." Even so, there's no rule that says scientists have to be boring and make their work inaccessible to everyone outside their field. This notion also begs the question of whether scientists are as dull as everyone says they are. I don't think so at all, although scientists do suffer from an image problem. Ask a child to draw what a scientist looks like and you'll get something like Albert Einstein or the stereotypical "mad scientist"; an elderly, bespectacled white male in a lab coat holding a flask with some bubbling liquid inside. (This image issue also brings up the point that women, minorities, and young scientists are almost never represented.) I doubt that most children are attending professional conferences, so this image is probably cobbled together from hearing about historical figures like Einstein and Edison as well as cartoons, and this problem is difficult to overcome unless teachers & parents go out of their way to correct it.

I seem to have gone off on a bit of a tangent, but just be sure that you read Jennifer's post. You'll be glad you did.

*And he hasn't been above appearing in a video game commercial, either;