On practising what we preach
The following twitteration caught my eye the other day, and since I have given three talks this year, I wanted to take a moment to reflect with a view to improving my practices and to sharing with students:
I don’t know the full context of this conversation, but since Alex and Tyson are both involved in language, literacy and teaching English for Academic Purposes, I imagine they were having a bit of a rant about colleagues who probably teach presentation skills to their students but are not necessarily great presenters themselves (Alex, Tyson – forgive and correct me if I am wrong …).
So, I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and reflect on how I fare in the presentations department.
I’m going to list some negative and positive feedback that I have received over the years and add a few comments/justifications. My aim is twofold: to become a better presenter myself AND to show students that like them, I get nervous, mess-up, but survive.
Below are a few recurring things that audiences have said to me after a presentation.
The negatives
- you talk too fast and too much – yes, this is something I haven’t yet cracked. Like with word-counts, I struggle to keep to time limits. I need to follow my own advice here and actually rehearse the whole thing a couple of times beforehand, using the ‘record’ facility on PowerPoint so I can play it back to myself
NFEAP17, Oslo, Norway - you use big words – I know there is a fine line between using too much or too little jargon, but if you count ‘philology’, ‘semiology’ and ‘ontology’ as big words for an academic conference, then I make no apologies. Firstly, I assume that many in my audiences are familiar with this terminology; and secondly, if they are not, we almost always have internet access in a conference, so look it up and be glad you’ve learnt a new word! That’s exactly what I do when I come across new words and what I expect my students to do, too.
- you have really wordy slides – yep, I do. I use a lot of quotes in my presentations so not sure how to get round this one. I think I need to develop a less ambitious approach to presenting, i.e. saying just enough and leaving the rest to post-talk conversations …
The positives
- you are inspirational – I’ve been told this often and I feel really, really happy when someone says this because the best talks I have been to are ‘inspirational’, even though they don’t follow all the conventions
- you’ve taken an interesting angle – this happens quite often, too, and it paves the way for then having really good conversations
- you’ve made me think – when someone comes to look for you after the talk, this is such a good sign! It means they want to know more, carry on the discussion, share references, examples, insights. If this didn’t happen after a talk, I would feel defeated because it would mean no ideas were sparked
I’m taking a huge risk here, but if you have ever been to any of my presentations over the years, will you tell me what you thought? Honestly … You can comment on the blog or email me directly. I need honesty not diplomacy, please, because I genuinely do want to improve and genuinely want my students to see how all of this works.
Fingers crossed …