a thought for speakers

[Henry Spencer]

A pet peeve of mine came to mind the other day, and since I'm not a speaker
at this Usenix, I can indulge myself... :-)

Have you timed your talk?

There are few things that annoy an audience more, or give them a lower
opinion of the speaker, than the following.  Speaker starts out giving a
leisurely and interesting presentation of his material.  Halfway through,
he realizes he has ten more minutes to cover 80% of his material.  He goes
into frenzy mode, desperately trying to touch all the bases in his work,
punting all details to "well, that's in the paper", and finishes breathless,
having said absolutely nothing in those ten minutes that wasn't said
better and more entertainingly in the paper.

If you're going to ask an audience to listen to you, do your homework.
Don't assume that your talk is the right length automatically.  I once
timed what I thought would be a 20-minute talk and it came out to 60.
A wee bit of surgery was necessary to get it down to size.  Doing this
right means doing it in advance, not improvising wildly on the spur of
the moment.  The audience wants to hear the stuff that *isn't* in your
paper, or at least is there in relatively dry and formal type.  If you
run short of time, pick one topic and give it full attention, rather
than giving a whirlwind presentation of your outline.
-- 
"We're thinking about upgrading from    | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5."              |  henry at zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry