Lauro Brito de Almeida, Dr. EAC|FEA|USP(1)
Preparar e
fazer apresentações, acadêmicas ou não, com maior ou menor frequência fazem
parte de nossas vidas. Determinadas aprendizagens são, infelizmente, circunscritas
ao nosso meio [em algumas áreas,
fortemente protegidas por barreiras corporativistas, que em prejuízo do avanço do conhecimento e qualidade, continuam sólidas] e por isso deixamos de aprender, evoluir e incorporar os ensinamentos de outras
áreas do conhecimento. JonathanShewchuk, Professor de Computer Science University of
California at Berkeley é o autor do útil texto sobre apresentações,
a seguir reproduzido, que, felizmente mostra que podemos aprender e muito com
outras áreas do conhecimento.
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Giving an Academic
Talk
These are my
opinions on how to give a talk (using presentation software or transparencies)
in computer science or mathematics, distilled for my students and for students
attending Graphics Lunch. I go to conferences, see the same mistakes repeated
by many a speaker, and write my reactions here. You are welcome to disagree
with my opinions, as long as you think each issue through for yourself.
Preparing the talk
Your slides. The plain absurdity of
modern academic talks would be glaring if we hadn't all pickled in it for so
long. Recall the last one you attended. The speaker flashed a slide full of
words on the screen and talked. Did you read and understand the slide? Did you
hear every word spoken? No, you had to make a decision about what to miss.
Recall the last talk you gave. I bet you
made the same mistake. Ask yourself: why are you projecting a slide that
virtually guarantees that your audience will stop listening to you? If you
expect them to listen, why are you showing slides that they won't have time to
read? Like circumcision or Christmas fruitcake, we do it out of tradition, not
because it isn't nasty.
If you want to be
a great speaker, you must first
accept the fact that a slide with more than twelve words on it is usually
counterproductive. Next, accept that this means you
will have to prepare harder than the 99% of your colleagues who are still
babbling to fill the time while the audience puzzles over their slides.
How do you stamp
out those excess words? First, your
new modus operandi is to express all your ideas in pictures. Resort to text only where
illustrations fail you. As an exercise, try to make a talk where the only text is the slide titles, and perhaps
a few two-word labels on figures. Even if you don't quite succeed (I never do),
you'll learn a lot about presentation by trying.
Second, examine your unconscious belief that the purpose of slides is to remind you what to
say. Once upon a time, speakers prepared index cards. Today, speakers
project their index cards (as a list of bullet points) and make their audiences
read them. Please
understand that this
is a hostile act. Go back to index cards. Some presentation programs let
you write notes that appear only on your laptop screen.
As an exercise,
imagine this scenario. You are projecting a slide that has nothing but a title, say
“Advantages of Matrix Projection.” You have in your hand (or on your laptop
screen, but not on the big screen) a list reminding you of all the points you
want to make. You simply talk to your audience, just like Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. Can
you see how much better this is than bullet points? Now imagine if you had an
apt illustration for each item on your list, and simply showed them (under the
same title) one by one as you spoke.
In summary, minimize words and maximize
pictures. Your slides are not there to remind you what to say. Bullet points
make your audience feel your talk is in bullet time. Here are a few other tips.
- Most talks I attend use fonts that are too small.
Your academic colleagues are all nearsighted. I use 38 point text and
42–50 point titles. As wise speakers rarely put more than twelve words on
a slide, there's plenty of room.
- Projected slides, unlike printed documents, do
not need margins. Yet most speakers put wide bands of empty space on the
border of every slide. I feel that they are taunting the audience: “I
could have used a readable font and big pictures, but I decided to do
extra work to make them illegible.”
- Use only sans-serif fonts. They're easier to see
from the back of the room. (Exception: math fonts usually have
serifs.)
- Simplicity is the best aesthetic. Your audience
has very little time to absorb what's on your slide, especially with you
nattering on all the time. Some people put accretions like project logos,
the talk title, and the conference name on every page. Don't.
- For slides with formulae, one of my favorite
tricks is to add arrows and labels pointing to the variables in a formula,
reminding the audience what each one means. Few people will remember
nomenclature that you defined on a previous slide.
- A
talk of 30 minutes or more needs to be broken into sections, with a title slide or an outline slide
demarcating each new section. (For shorter talks, use your judgment.
Outline slides and the accompanying speeches are boring, so keep both
short.) The goal of the title
slides is to alert your audience to transitions and changes of subject,
and to tell it in advance what all the individual slides in the section
will add up to. (A problem description? An algorithm? A proof? An
empirical demonstration
of your idea's wonderfulness? An evisceration of all previous work on the
topic?)
Your organization. The most common
mistake is to spend too much time on technical details, and too little time
setting the context. A talk of 30 minutes or less should be an advertisement
for the paper, not a
replacement. Your goal is to convince your listeners that
they must read your paper. This is a very ambitious goal. Focus on the big picture issues.
- Why is the problem you are solving worth solving?
- What is the core
difference between your
method and all those that came before? This is really a two-part question
(which most speakers screw up by answering only the second part).
- What does your method accomplish that no previous method accomplishes?
- What algorithmic or methodological idea enables your method to accomplish more?
- What is the evidence that your method is better in
some circumstances? (And what are those circumstances?)
- What is the one
big idea that you want
people to leave your talk with? If you try to get across five ideas, you
will usually impart none. If you choose one main idea and focus on
advertising it, you will usually succeed. “Give them something to take
home.”
These big picture ideas should also be foremost in
your mind when you write a paper. They are so important, I'm not going to say
anything more about organization. Put these issues first when you put your talk
together, and you'll already be one of the best speakers at the conference.
I will let someone else say something about organization,
though. I like the following quote from Herman Haverkort's defunct blog enough to excerpt
it here.
We got explained two models of giving a talk: the clew model and the
onion model.
The clew is a logical, linear argument
building up to a conclusion at the end of the talk, like a clew unwinding until
you finally come to the core. Miss one step in the talk and you lose the plot
and miss the point. And yes indeed, this is exactly what happens when I listen
to most conference talks and some lectures. In a three days' conference, I
actually follow the first five minutes of one or two dozen talks. That is more
or less it. After those five minutes, I get lost. I miss a “slide” because I am
still thinking about the previous one, get distracted by some random personal
associations I had with something the speaker said, or simply doze off because
the speaker has a tiring accent.
The onion talk starts with the main
message, and adds depth in successive layers around it, always returning to the
main message between layers. Since the main message and the main ideas are
repeated often, a listener can still follow most of the talk even after dozing
off for a minute. Also the talk does not get screwed up near the end when the
speaker is running out of time, because by then, the most important things have
been said already and the speaker has no reason to hurry.
The final pass. When your slides
are done, go through them and examine each slide's title carefully. Do the
titles emphasize the right things? I bet you can improve at least half of them.
The job of each title is to set the context and tell listeners what your words
are trying to accomplish. When audience members wake up mid-talk and try to pay
attention again, the first thing they'll do is look at your current slide's
title. Make sure it tells them why you're babbling on about grommets right now.
Giving the talk
Practice. It's obvious, but lots of
people still don't do it. Give a practice talk (even if you're alone) before
you give a public one. Better yet, give three.
Pointers. I really, truly
despise laser pointers, but this is because most people use them badly.
Astonishingly badly. Buy an old-fashioned telescoping pointer—they're much
easier to follow with the eye. They also force you to move around. Speakers
with laser pointers tend to roost in one spot, like barnacles excreting glue,
for their entire talk. Because a telescoping pointer forces you to gesture and
walk, your voice will become more dynamic as well.
Of course, there
are some venues where the screen is too big for a physical pointer. Rule: if
you must use a laser pointer, when you point at something, hold the pointer steady. Most
people try to circle an object instead of pointing at it. Guess what? Nobody
has a clue what you're pointing at! I have sat in conferences and watched one
speaker after another after another do this, all oblivious to the fact that
their audience has no idea what they're indicating. If you just saw the screen
and not the speakers, you'd think the speakers were breakdancing.
(Little-known
literary fun fact: according to Dante, the third circle of Hell is the home of
those who use the
mouse and cursor
to point at things.)
Laptops. Before the
session, remember to turn off your laptop's screen saver. As well as any
application that might try to download the latest version of RealPlayer
mid-talk. (This is not a hypothetical occurrence.)
Another way
speakers make themselves look goofy is by staring at their laptops' screens
while speaking. It's human nature for your audience to follow your eyes, so use
human nature to your advantage. When you look at the projection screen, the
audience's eyes will follow yours and their attention will be where you want
it. When you look at the audience, they will listen to what you say. When you
look at your laptop screen, your audience will be distracted; they'll neither
hear what you're saying nor see what you want them to look at. Try to place
your laptop screen where you can't see it.
Opening. Begin a talk by
introducing yourself by name, even if you've just been introduced—unless you've
received an unusually long and clear introduction. The session chairs who
introduce people at conferences often garble the names or fail to use the
microphone. People are finishing off conversations while the chair introduces
you. The people in the back of the room probably didn't hear the introduction,
even if it sounded clear to you. If the talk is
important enough (e.g. a job talk), have your spiel memorized for the first few
slides, so you get a smooth start no matter how flustered and tired you are.
(Of course, never memorize a whole talk, as you'd sound terribly stilted.)
Nonverbal
communication. An
infamous study by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher
Evaluations From Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” shows that
students can predict a teacher's ratings with significant accuracy after
watching a 30-secondsilent video
clip of the teacher at work. Resist the urge to attribute this to the
superficiality of students' ratings. What is the nonverbal magic that an
audience recognizes so quickly?
I believe they are
seeing communication uncluttered by extraneous motion, facial expressions,
fidgeting, utterances, and other nonverbal behaviors so subtle that the speaker
is entirely unaware of doing them. A faint, transient facial expression or a
brief unconscious twitch of the arm are enough to rob a speaker's words of
their force, and even break an audience's attention. But how can you fix this?
Your mental focus. I believe that the
secret is in where you habitually place your attention. When you speak, most of
your attention is on what you are saying. But if you've rehearsed decently,
you'll have some mental room left over, and other thoughts will fill the
vacuum. If you could listen to a speaker's thoughts, you might hear “Am I going
too fast?” or “Are they understanding this?” or “How do I look?” or worse yet,
“I wonder if they like me.” Any thought regarding whether the audience approves
of you or not is the worst place to put your mental focus. It's
like beseeching God to make you a loser.
One of the biggest
epiphanies of my life is a fact that probably seems counterintuitive to most
people who think for a living: if
you're already thinking of what to say next while somebody is still speaking to
you, you will appear socially inept and they won't like you. When you're the one speaking, there's
a similar principle: if you're
in your head, you will look awkward and speak awkwardly.
Great
speakers—like great leaders—habitually focus on the right things, which means
almost anything outside their own egos. Perhaps the best place to focus your
attention is on the sensations
in your own body: How do my legs feel? Will I feel more relaxed if I
breathe just a little deeper? Am I enjoying the rhythm of my voice as I speak?
(Ideally, these aren't verbal thoughts; they're felt perceptions.) The next best place is
on the sensations in the bodies of your audience. Of course, you can't know for
sure what they feel, but you can empathize and try to guess. Don't do it in a
“Do they like me?” way; your attention should be on their welfare. Try to open your body to physical pleasure and connection.
This focus on
physical sensation has several benefits. It clarifies your communication:
fidgeting and misleading gestures attenuate; your voice and rhythm improve; and
you slow down your motions and speech. Your focus on your body gives you more
presence in the eyes of the audience, and you marshall energy toward projecting
your message with congruent body language. Your focus on the sensations of your
audience makes them feel connected to you. This sensate focus awakens your
limbic system, while leaving your cerebral cortex free to do the talking.
If you're not a
natural, it takes discipline to change your habits and permanently refocus your
attention. Academics, especially mathematicians, are not known for being in
their bodies. Let it be something you practice not just when you give a formal
talk, but during your day-to-day socializing. Learning to habitually place your
attention outside your ego and on your body sensations and the people around
you will not only make you a better speaker; it will improve your relationships
with everyone.
Speaking. Good speaking has
rhythm. Ever hear an entire talk delivered in a uniform, unchanging cadence, as
if the whole speech was one long paragraph? I've heard lots of those. Choose
key points in your talk where you wish to bestow extra emphasis. (If you
followed my advice on preparation, you know what these points are.) Then decide
how you will emphasize them. Sometimes I do this by speaking with a
particularly slow and deliberate voice. Sometimes I say outright, “Here's the
most important idea in this talk.”
Silence can be
articulate. Leave a long pause right after making a key point. Let it sink in.
There are two
mental adjustments that will help you speak fluidly. The first is a mental
focus on body sensations, discussed above. The second is to give yourself
permission to take as long as you like to think of what to say next. This is
easy to say, but hardly anybody internalizes this attitude. Do you ever find
yourself saying “Uhhhhh”? If so, you don't really believe you have permission.
Some part of you is afraid of losing your audience if you don't fill the
silence.
Tell yourself that
there's no hurry, no need to fill empty spaces with sound, and certainly no
need to get to the end of your slides. (Structure your talk so this is true!)
The audience is too busy trying to understand your slide to care how long it
takes you to think of the next sentence. Trust yourself. Think patiently. The
right words come faster if you don't force them. Demand your right to remain
silent.
Never meta-comment on
your speaking. How often have you heard a speaker say, “I guess I'm running out
of
time; I'll just go
through this quickly”? Did you hear a single word he said after that? Silently
decide what to do; don't burden your audience with it.
Closing. Always end your
talk by saying “Thank you.” It is not pretentious—you are doing the audience a
favor. If you do not cue the audience so they know when to applaud, they will
be confused and irritated. Like most social rituals, the thanks-applause
sequence comforts everyone. Do not ask for questions until you complete it.
That's all! Most
everything else, especially aesthetics, is learned through practice and
feedback. I could go on, but by trying to teach more I'd teach less. Same goes for you.
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Caras e caros, bom divertimento, isto é, aproveitamento.
(1) Lauro Brito de
Almeida, Doutor em Controladoria e Contabilidade pela FEA/USP,
Pós-Doutorando em Administração pelo PPAD PUC PR e Professor do PPG Mestrado em
Contabilidade da UFPR. Interesses de pesquisas em Análise Gerencial de Custos,
Economia de Empresas e Educação, Ensino e Pesquisa. Experiência e atuação profissional
em Análise Gerencial de Custos, Orçamento Empresarial, Elaboração de Plano de
Negócios para Pequenas e Médias Empresas, Analise Econômica e Financeira e
Elaboração de Estudos e Pareceres. Contato: gbrito@uol.com.br
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