{"id":1862,"date":"2013-03-11T09:43:02","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T09:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/presentation-skills-blog.co.uk\/?p=1862"},"modified":"2013-03-11T09:43:02","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T09:43:02","slug":"why-do-presentations-by-experts-suck-so-often","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/why-do-presentations-by-experts-suck-so-often\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do presentations by experts suck so often?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"big_microphone_small\"<\/a>I\u2019m working at one of the country\u2019s big, leading universities teaching some PhD students how to make presentations for academic conferences. (Believe me, I have more experience of sitting through bad academic presentations than any one should be made to suffer!).\u00a0 \u201cPresentations\u201d I told them \u201caren\u2019t about telling people what you know<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Stunned silence<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re about telling people what they need to know in the way they need to know it.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

An even louder silence (and yes, you know what I mean – silence can be loud!).<\/p>\n

Then the penny dropped – I was asking them to make their presentations intelligible, to make them understandable, to make them \u2018simple\u2019, so that other people could understand them!<\/p>\n

After all, the whole point of an oral presentation at an academic conference is to allow your peers to look at what you\u2019re working on with a view to spotting flaws and improving it.\u00a0 That\u2019s how science progresses…<\/p>\n

Academics, being humans, don\u2019t like this.<\/p>\n

Who would?<\/p>\n

Being told – in a room full of your peers – that you\u2019ve made a mistake isn\u2019t nice… but surely it\u2019s better than the alternative… of not being told you\u2019ve made a mistake!<\/p>\n

I have a set of questions I suggest to my clients before they begin to design their presentation – to help make the presentation accessible to their audeinces. The first of these presentations is \u201cWhat does my audience already know?<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p>\n

I know it\u2019s a shockingly simple question, but you\u2019d be stunned at how many presenters fail to ask it of themselves. (Or maybe you wouldn\u2019t if you\u2019ve sat through bad presentations!). If you don\u2019t ask yourself what your audience already knows you\u2019re just asking for trouble.<\/p>\n

Things that can go wrong include a million subtle problems but also some serious crass presentation-killers such as<\/p>\n