The best scientific talk advice that gets ignored

I have a confession. My attention span in conferences has been waning. It's been quite a while since I've sat through an entire session of talks. Sometimes I'm room-hopping to catch particular talks, but more often I'm in the hallways. I want to be in there to learn and to support presenters when they're junior scientists. But I have limits.

It doesn't help when most of the talks are unengaging. You know some talks fly by in a whirl, and other talks of the exact same length can drag on forever? I'm not pleased to say this but I do think that the majority of conference talks belong in the latter category. This isn't about any particular meeting or symposium or whatever. It's literally every conference I've been to.

What can we do about UCPS (Unengaging Conference Presentation Syndrome)?

Well. There is no shortage of great advice, and I don't want to recapitulate all of that. But I'd like to emphasize they key pieces of advice that I think most often go unheeded.

There are a a lot of decades-long norms for scientific talks that make for bad presentations. It's hard to be bold and go against the grain, especially for students who have seen a bunch of conference talks and feel that their role is to fit in and do it like most other people.

In other words, a lot of folks will be satisfied to give a lackluster talk rather than break with convention to give a great talk.

What are the things about that keep me in a room instead of chilling out in the hallway? Here's my list.

Clean slides that I don't have to read. When there's a person standing in front of the room telling their story, it's hard to follow when there's a bunch of stuff to read on the slide behind them. If I wanted to read about the project, I'd wait for the paper to come out. I'm there to pay attention to the person telling the tale!

What do you use instead of text? Photos and figures. Use images to enhance the words, rather than be redundant or saturate the audience with information. If your talk is trying to communicate more words than can come out of your mouth, then it's trying to say too much. "Less is more" is a useful cliché.

I think the best scientific talks I've seen have had almost no text. Just relevant (and beautiful) pictures, helpful diagrams, informative figures, and a cleanly-stated conclusion. Which is bring us to the next problem:

A compelling storyline. Science communication 101 is that you need to share your science as a story. This is still true when talking with fellow scientists. I think folks are reluctant to lean into storytelling because this places themselves as the protagonists. This storytelling approach isn't compatible with the model of a dispassionate scientist speaking in passive voice describing research from a neutral standpoint. Which is good because that's not what any of us are doing.

What are the elements of a story? There is a problem and a protagonist, there is a challenge that must be overcome, there are adventures and new interesting characters, and there is a climax and a resolution. There are a bunch of good books out there about storytelling. Science communication is more than storytelling, and a good story isn't necessarily a good talk. But a good talk requires a good story.

While I find TED talks to be annoying in a lot of ways, you have to admit that they are carefully designed to be compelling stories, and they are incredibly easy to watch. Imagine if you harnessed that same storytelling power for your own science!

A clear story isn't dragged down by minutia. I understand why people include extremely detailed methods in their talks, especially when it's students who are concerned about communicating to the audience that the science is sound and that they did it right. Though I understand this compulsion, that doesn't mean I want to spend 8 minutes of a 15 minute talk to hear about all of the methodological details. Can we leave that to the peer reviewers? Much of the point of a conference presentation is that you can talk with people after your talk about your work. There is a small number of people in the room who really care about those details. How about they can chat about those things after the talk?

So how do you present the methods without going overboard? Include a slide or two saying what you did. Make sure that you provide enough information so that people know what you did and that your results can be interpreted. It is impossible to satisfy the haters by providing them with an avalanche of methodological detail. Don't even try. Instead, have a presentation that is so put together that the audience has confidence in you that you did it right. I suppose this might go against the scoring rubrics given to some student conference talk award judges. Don't gloss over the method, but know that once you start going into deep cuts, you've lost most of your audience. We want to see results, interpretation, insight. Detailed methods, those we can get from the eventual publication.

A cracking and clearly stated conclusion. I understand that science is complex and there are a lot of subtle things found in the results. Nonetheless, if you want folks to talk about your work with others, give them one or two key things at the end of the talk that you want to emphasize. A take-home message is literally one that people take home to share with others, so you've got to spell it out for everybody nice and clear. While you're at it, put the acknowledgments after your title side and get them out of the way, so you can end your talk with your punchy conclusion.

While there are lots of other standard pieces of advice for talks, these are the ones that always stick out to me as most necessary and most ignored.

And hey, if you happen to be at the entomology meeting in a couple weeks, we'll see whether I am able to live up to my own standards.