Respect your audience


Something I touched on in my previous blog post is that your audience doesn’t owe you anything, and I think this holds for presentations even more than for writing. 



If your audience zones out, they can’t just restart the sentence over again. They have to fight to catch back up, reading the slide to try to make up for what they missed while hearing, interpreting, and understanding what you’re saying currently. 



If you don’t respect your audience, if you don’t understand that they are not robots who will sit patiently and process everything you have to say, the chances of people zoning out is high. That’s why I tried to make my journal club presentation digestible, exciting, and fun. By engaging my audience in a way that was fresh and interesting, I communicated more effectively and also had more fun doing it. Catching your audience off guard with strange analogies, relating results to exciting new technologies, constantly reminding  your audience about the chain of logic or narrative you develop throughout your presentation. These are all ways to keep your audience on their toes, to keep them interested and to ensure they are following what you are saying. I think the most effective presentations are those that linger in the minds of their audiences. They are ones that make people see connections with their own work, or future possibilities. They are ones that people can summarize and repeat to friends and coworkers. “I went to this really cool presentation about BRCA2 mutations and it reminded me of the work you are doing with…” By not just presenting the facts and conclusions, but by trying to respect and connect your audience, I think you can present more effectively.


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