144 12 Beyond the Thesis
the audience reasons to go and read whatever you have written. A talk is a success if
it persuades people that this is significant, robust work with worthwhile outcomes,
undertaken by a competent researcher; it doesn’t need to include every thought or
detail. Those are in your writing, and the audience can find them there.
A third principle is ‘have mercy on the audience’. You are on a mission to tell a
story; make it easy to listen to. This involves considering both the profound and the
superficial. Superficial: pictures amuse and inform; use them, if it makes sense to
do so. Develop the narrative rapidly, and don’t spend too long on any one stage of
the talk. Engage with the audience and treat them as equals—expect to be treated as
an equal in return. Don’t read from a script, or worse, from your overheads; there is
nothing worse than the presenter who reads from his or her typescript, head down,
no eye contact, voice droning, no visual material. Practise, but not to excess. Pro-
found: be clear to yourself on what your message is, and design your talk as a logical
path to that message. Identify secondary messages, and cut them out unless there
is a real need for them. Don’t be afraid to expose your uncertainty, or areas where
you want advice, or unexpected challenges you have found. Be forthright about the
things that didn’t work (if they are relevant) or the evidence that pointed the wrong
way. Be honest and open.
Gather the material for a talk by brainstorming, just as I described in the context
of identifying conclusions in Chap. 9. It helps to be relaxed and not under too much
pressure. Your aim is to identify the elements of your work that you particularly
want the audience to learn; the talk should be designed around helping the audience
to understand these elements and why they are significant or interesting. Simplicity
is good; if you think you have too much, you are almost certainly right, and some-
thing needs to be removed.
The broad pattern of a talk is much like that of a paper: introduction, background,
approach, results, interpretation. But each of these must be approached in a quite
different way to that in a paper. The introduction, for example, might begin with a
dramatic statement that sets the context for the whole talk. A colleague of mine re-
cently began a talk by saying ‘the such-and-such institute just received $10 million
in funding for a supercomputer to process this data; with these new methods, maybe
one day it could be done on a thousand-dollar laptop’. A strong result allows an
opening of this kind; so does a controversial problem. Other topics will have their
own strategy, but the fundamental point is that you can design a delivery strategy
for a talk on just about anything.
Expect to be nervous. Most speakers are. A key point to remember is that people
are at your talk, for the most part, because they expect it to be interesting—they are
not there to criticize, or to be aggressive or unhelpful. Likewise, the audience will
have plenty of experience of novice speakers, and won’t have unrealistic expecta-
tions. The best cure for nerves is, one, to know your topic well and, two, to start
speaking. If you have brainstormed the talk well, and have good material to speak
to—and, ahead of time, you should have ensured that you do have something sen-
sible to say about every slide—then those nerves should quickly ebb away.
As mentioned above, you should never read your notes aloud, or read from your
slides. By all means use notes to prompt yourself (though many people find them