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Best Talks

I'm at a point in my career where I assign percentiles to the talks I give. I've given enough of them by now (at least two a year for over thirty years) to make that useful. I like to think that I've improved with age and that the percentiles are higher now because of that but I may be getting softer as a grader. It's subjective.

I gave a talk this morning that felt good giving and seemed to be well-received. It felt good giving because it was about an aspect of my teaching that I've been using for a long time and am fairly confident in discussing and answering questions about. It was well-received because I'm an energetic speaker when I'm confident (it's a mask I put on) and because the talk was highly visual, which makes the audience more engaged and more likely to respond to its quality.

I've given shakier talks (and in recent years) because of my lack of confidence in the material but I do try to follow some basic rules about presentations. It helped in contrast that there were a number of talks preceding mine that did not.

  • Just because the author can read the screen sitting in front of their computer does not mean the audience can, sitting in the back row. I use software that never allows too small a font for slides and I practice the talk in a classroom wandering through the room looking for legibility issues.
  • I never assume the audience has perfect recall of earlier slides, and repeat material as needed.
  • I try to include something graphic that is relevant on each slide.
  • I encourage at the beginning and end for people to contact me (email on each slide) if they would like the slides. It always goes better when folk are not trying to take notes the whole time.
I'll give myself a 90th percentile for this morning's talk.

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