It’s a peculiarity of scholarly life that everyone is expected to be able to deliver a lecture well, but almost no one is trained to do it….If you put your bulleted ideas up on slides, your audience will look at the slides, not at you. You’ll also be teaching them that What You Have to Say Can Be Summarized in a Few Words. Can it? —William Germano —The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver (Chronicle)
Here’s one of my suggestions for organizing oral presentations… plan in advance what you will cut if you run short of time. I’ve attended far too many lectures in which the speaker has prepared three examples, but the whole audience got the speaker’s point after the second example. Save time for the conclusion, and if your first or second example runs long, cut it out altoghether. And don’t announce, “I’m going to cut my third example,” just don’t mention it, and launch right into your conclusion.
This is manageable. Far better than some semesters.
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Perfect example of one of many ways PowerPoint and its clones are misused and generally anathema to anyone who expects a lively presentation (no matter the context). I'm thinking particularly of this article, and thisone.
Thanks for pointing out this excellent article. I like your advice, too (though it is necessary to announce dropping a point if it was mentioned in an overview at the beginning of the lecture... I usually say in my overview of the lecture that "if there's time after all that, we'll discuss X" which assumes before the fact that I might run out of time). I'll "Pedablogue" this entry.