a thought for speakers

[Don Libes]

In article <1991May28.183003.18759 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>A pet peeve of mine came to mind the other day...
>If you're going to ask an audience to listen to you, do your homework.

Here's a related peeve:
The audience is responsible for homework, too.

>The audience wants to hear the stuff that *isn't* in your paper...

At a USENIX last year we were given 5 minutes for questions at the end
of our talks.  Due to this lack of time, I answered almost every
question with "Good question, it's discussed at length in the paper."
The third time I did this the audience started laughing since it was
so reminiscent of "RTFM".  Unfortunately, humor was not my intent.

I felt very sorry about it because I got plenty of good questions
later, but it can easily take a person, say, 40 seconds to ask a
question.  All you need are several like this to take up your five
minutes.

I had carefully timed everything, but with time so limited (we had 15
minutes to speak), the audience must do their part as well.  Read the
papers beforehand of any talks at which you think you might ask
questions.  (This statement really belongs in the conference program.)

Don Libes          libes at cme.nist.gov      ...!uunet!cme-durer!libes