[prepend]

I have this discussion quite a bit with colleagues who specialize in communication.

I want to convey technical and scientific material. My presentation isn’t to motivate a billion people to buy an iPhone. My presentation is meant to inform 50-100 people to learn a new technique. And the slide deck is markers for where they can follow up later for detail and references.

I too see presentations with walls of text. I go to academic and scientific conferences. This is helpful to me. I like it better than posters. I don’t want to go to a conference and have a bunch of Steve Jobs (or more likely Elizabeth Holmes) giving one word per slide presentations.

I also don’t have 100 people working on my slide deck. It’s just me. I don’t need a TED talk.

I wish people would recognize the different purposes and audiences for presentations.

[malshe]

The inside joke among academicians is that our slides have wall of text because we make them on the flight while going to the conferences! Our presentations tend to be bland because the audience is reading off the slides and ignore what the speaker is saying. That's why for our doctoral students we make it mandatory to present at least twice internally before presenting to external audiences. Otherwise, they have these giant tables copied from the manuscript and pasted on the slides, which most people can't read without binoculars.

[harrall]

Yeah but people will put 40 lines of code on a slide and read through it, expecting that it will explain the underlying concept while I’m trying to parse a ton of code in front of my eyes.

Most of the time that I am presenting technical material, I spend it on explaining the concepts through short descriptions, hand-draw illustrations or diagrams.

If there’s code to show, it will be smaller snippets interspersed between those slides. If attendees want to deep dive into 100 lines of code, it is best that they do it on their own time at their own pace after I send out the materials.

I actually talk about code but this applies to non-technical presentations too. Yeah, it’s also not a sales presentation but don’t wall-of-text me.

Explain concepts to me.