Eldan Goldenberg's lab notebook

When text hampers communication

Last year I gave my first conference presentation. It was also a first in another way, because it was the first time I had given a presentation that was really well-rehearsed, had gone through successive drafts, and had a structure that had been picked over carefully.

In my 5 years studying at Sussex I had to give plenty of presentations because most classes required students to present at least one topic in a seminar setting. Very few of these were assessed and counted towards the coursework grades, and even when they were, expectations were rather low. People did routinely get away with the worst thing I've seen in academic presentations: putting the same content on slides and handouts, and just reading [mumbling] it out loud. Of course, this had a lot to do with many students not wanting to give these presentations, so putting as little time as possible into preparing them.

The presentation last year could not have been more different. There were two practice runs with an audience [the rest of the lab], and the whole style was the antithesis of reading the slides out loud. My advisor is particularly strongly opposed to that, and encouraged me to go to the opposite extreme, by having very little text on the slides at all. I was a little worried that he had pushed me too far in that direction, because the slides (downloadable as PDF or powerpoint) are not very meaningful on their own.

Yesterday, I saw an interesting research finding that gives my advisor's approach some validation: Adding text to a screen in a multimedia presentation that is identical to the narration harms the ability of the audience to understand the information. So there we have it. At the cost of making slides that don't stand alone, removing most of the text from the visual aids in a presentation dramatically increases its effectiveness.

For what it's worth, I don't even think that cost is one worth worrying about. After all, the visual aids of a presentation aren't supposed to stand alone; they are inherently part of a package that includes someone talking (and the less scripted the speech is, the less likely the speaker is to drone soporifically), and often other supporting print material. In the case of a conference presentation, there's normally a paper which everyone in the audience has in the proceedings already. That's what people who want a stand-alone presentation of the information should be looking at.