How to Give a Talk

I give a lot of talks. What useful advice can I give to other speakers?

The simplest is not to write out your talk in advance. Unless you are a good enough actor to make it sound as though you are simply talking to the audience, which few of us are, reading from a written text sounds wooden and raises the  question of why you didn’t let us read it ourselves instead of reading it to us like a parent reading to a child. Better to make your audience feel as if you are holding a conversation with them, although a one sided one until the question period.

My way of doing this, going back something over fifty years, is to have a list of topics to help me keep track of the structure of the talk but no written text of what I am going to say. In the old days I did it with an outline of the talk on one side of a 3x5 card . Nowadays, printed out from my computer, it might be a page or two but still an outline.

The Powerpoint Problem

I often use Powerpoint, especially when most of the people in the audience are not native speakers of English. It is easier to follow a talk in a foreign language, even one you know pretty well, if you have both the spoken and written version: Redundancy is your friend. But as the powerpoint slides grow into a detailed outline,  I get closer and closer to  reading them to the audience, the pattern I want to avoid.

The talk I gave to the Adam Smith Institute in London on my recent speaking trip was done without Powerpoint;  I gave the same talk some years earlier at Porcfest in New Hampshire with Powerpoint. The talk I gave in Poznan a few days before the London talk was done without Powerpoint; I gave the  same talk in Brazilia with Powerpoint.¹ Listening to the four talks let you compare how well the same speaker gives the same talk with and without Powerpoint. Readers who would like more data may want to look at the page of talks on my web site. There are fourteen different talks given and recorded at least twice, often both with and without Powerpoint. See if you agree with me that the use of Powerpoint makes for a less successful talk.

I expect I will usually continue to use Powerpoint for audiences whose native language is not English but for future talks to native speakers of English I plan to do without it. I will continue to use Powerpoint for graphics, such as these for the talk I am giving at Porcfest in another month. That is a use of Powerpoint that does not risk turning speaking into reading aloud.

I will let you figure out for yourselves what points the figures illustrate.

Redundant Talks

My page of recorded speeches, in some cases ten or more performances of the same talk, raises the question of whether it is worth giving a talk more than once. Should I figure that once there is a video of a talk there is no reason to give it again, at least until I can construct a significantly improved version? A live talk does let the audience interact with the speaker during the question period; is that its only advantage?

Probably not. Consider a similar puzzle I have been thinking about much longer — why the mass lecture survived the invention of the printing press.

You can, if you are lucky, attend a lecture by the best lecturer on that subject in your university. You can read a book by the best author on the subject who ever lived. The lecture proceeds at the same speed for every student, some entirely lost, some bored with material they already know. If you are learning from a book you can reread parts you don’t understand, skim chapters covering material you already know; you can’t do that with a lecture. You can read a book at whatever time works best for you, possibly midnight or after; the lecture is given at the same time for everyone, very probably, if you are a night person, before you are fully awake. Students at a lecture may be allowed to ask questions but with several hundred people in the audience your chance of getting to ask one is low. You get to hear answers to other students’ questions — but a book’s author, having heard the questions back when he was teaching the course, can include the answers to them in what he writes.

And yet we still give mass lectures.

Students' unwillingness to re­ad textbooks is an eternal source of puzzlement to me and to my colleagues. If they are required to read a textbook, they will complain, and won't do much of the reading. I don't know why. (A commenter on a previous post who teaches a class with 500 students in it)

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1. For that one the slides are webbed.