ESWC - Part III

And the last part of this post series will be dedicated to something I am really fed of, and that is something you'll inevitably see in any conference or symposium yo go to: Poor presentation skills, poor speaking skills and oh my god poor slides! I have just gathered some of the (to my opinion) worst errors that are done again and again by people. Of course, most of these are young researchers but also the elderly and some of the established ones do the same errors:

Capital Error I: Slides are overloaded...this is the most common one, people try to make books fit on one single slide, this can be no good.

Capital Error II: People rarely use schemata or images to explain complex ideas. Instead, they rather have 3 slides with 15 lines of text on each..no need to say that anyone gets lost. This is why at the end of presentations you get questions that should have been clearly answered by the presentation such as: "why are you doing this?"...

Capital Error III: people just do not establish any contact with the audience, they just talk, do their thing and go. Just as some people are brilliant about writing papers (because there are precise techniques for this, that I still have to learn to get more papers accepted :D), they just do not care about presenting them well. The worst example of this is when hosts just speak for like 2 or 3 minutes (this is a lot of time believe me) while turning their back to the audience and looking at the screen. The ones who look the audience in the eyes and are able to check if people are following are not legions...

Capital Error IV: Slides are mostly hardly readable, either because the font used is too small, because slides are overloaded, because figures are too big and complex or because there are none, sometimes figures are not even explained. Imagine one attendee seeing a new slide with a super revolutionary graphic popping up and the host explaining things without making any reference to any part of the graphic. I know this too well because I used to make the same error in my papers, but now I am at least explaining my figures explicitly. Unfortunately I found no clear guide out there telling you how to write a good paper, it seems like some dark secret science that only professors are giving up to their best PhD students..when they have time.

Capital Error V: also, the stance usually taken by people, if they are not forced to stand somewhere because of a microphone for example, is not always the best. People sometimes hide completely the screen to half the audience, look the hole time on their laptop to read their slides (litterally) or something else.

Anyways, this was no inventory of bad presentation errors, this was simply what I noted while attending the conference. But it made me aware that I must have lots of things I may not be conscious about neither that I have to learn in order to achieve my goal of becoming a good presenter one day. So I will start looking for some resources on the net and watch carefully the videos of presentations by experienced people. I would also appreciate any help guys , you are welcome to help out here.

Marwane El Kharbili