can be published in the small spaces of isolated
abstracts and posters.
Audiovisual presentations at academic
meetings
It is amazing that apparently intelligent people
often attempt to speak to their peers at academic
meetings with (a) disorganized speech (due to
disordered thought processes and/or acute episodic
dysarthria) and (b) an inability to control a Power-
point^1 projector that should by now have univer-
sally replaced the former chaos they created with
200 200 photographic slides. This ineptitude is
displayed by all medical specialties (including
clinical trialists), by most other nonmedical profes-
sions, and has shown no sign of improvement dur-
ing the past three decades. One’s amazement is all
the greater because these incompetent speakers
must often have heard equally bad productions,
and today’s projector controls are simpler than an
hotel alarm clock.
The most important time when making oral
publications is before you even begin the talk.
You should have the following three thingssine
qua non:
(a) An understanding of the audience and the
vocabulary needed to communicate with
them (the general public, a patient advocacy
group, an academic society and an in-house
department seminar all require very different
approaches).
(b) A slide set that is cogent, organized and
familiar.
(c) A look at the venue and the various pieces of
equipment that will be at your disposal; think
about how to match your speaking volume to
the open-air or to the microphone (if any),
where to stand so that you can see your slides
without having your back to the audience, and
how to use a laser pointer without imitating a
demented insect.
For the actual talk itself, one useful checklist is as
follows:
(a) What is the take-home message, in one simple
sentence of the language of the conference?
(e.g. ‘Drug X was superior to placebo in treat-
ing disease Y, in a patient population with
characteristics A, B, and C, i.e. like the known
epidemiology of the disease’).(b) State the purpose of the talk at the beginning:
usually, this will be to explain how one will
defend the take-home message. (‘This talk
is to describe the clinical trial that has led us
to conclude that drug X is effective for dis-
ease Y in a patient population that is repre-
sentative of the known epidemiology of this
disease.’)(c) Organize one’s slides in a manner that would
be used sequentially to illustrate a written
paper in a peer-reviewed journal (see above).(d) Make sure all slides are legible (e.g. a mini-
mum of bold 24 point text for a Microsoft^1 ,
Powerpoint^1 presentation).(e) Avoid tables of data in slides; if you cannot
graph it, then it is probably not worth showing
at all.(f) Make the text of each slide concise (e.g. max-
imum of 30 words per slide).(g) Create slides to be self-supporting: if you gave
your set of slides to someone equipped with a
projector, could they, without any further
explanation, more or less work out your subject
and principal conclusions?(h) Plan to use about one slide per minute of time
allotted.(i) If you are an iconoclast and still using photo-
graphic slides, then at least number your slides
with bright labels on the plastic holder (so that
you can see or feel the bright label in near
darkness). Use a consistent location for your
label, and then use that label to orient the slide
when loading the carousel. Usually, but not
always, this is ‘right way round, wrong way42.4 THE CLASSIC COMPONENTS OF A CLINICAL TRIAL REPORT IN A PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL 569