Why is Your Talk So Bad?

I love attending good talks. It’s one of my favorite things. There’s also little I dislike more than attending bad talks. My mind wanders; it takes a herculean effort to maintain focus. If the talk is boring, I will absolutely pull out my phone. If it’s unbearable, I’ll leave. Life is short.

I used to give middling talks. I still do, but I used to too. This essay isn’t an attempt to show off or give advice. I’m not a savant—I’m an enthusiast. I write from the perspective of an experienced audience member. To research this essay, I simply attended thousands of talks over the last two decades.

Every bad talk is bad in its own way, but some flaws are common. The slides are a parallel track and don’t help you understand what the speaker is saying. Small text. Colored text. Walls of text. The speaker is too quiet or subdued. They suffer from the curse of knowledge, taking for granted ideas that the audience needs help to understand. Or they make the opposite mistake, belaboring blindingly obvious points. They cram in too much material. Some speakers run way over, and when informed they’re running out of time, make no adjustments to wrap up—the offenders, of course, are always established academics.

In the humanities, one mistake is omnipresent: reading the paper. (Scientists: it’s true, we do this, all the time.) In the very worst such talks, the speaker reads in a monotone voice and barely looks up. But it’s awful regardless, even if they affect a lively tone.

Here’s why. A good paper is a chain of arguments, each hooked to the previous one. If you miss something or forget, you can go back. Obviously, you can’t do that in a talk. Stop paying attention for a moment and you lose the whole thread. The talk unravels. A handout can help, but it spoils the experience by splitting your attention. Now you’re reading instead of listening.

More broadly, oral communication is a different medium from written communication. Reading a paper means neglecting every other modality. It needn’t be a total disaster. But thinking that reading is better than presenting—as some do—is like thinking radio is better than video.

All of this should be obvious, but then why do people still choose reading over presenting? One reason is laziness. They don’t want to do anything between writing the paper and giving the talk. Another reason is fear. If they try to perform, they might fail and embarrass themselves. Better to lower the bar.

Every good talk is also good in its own way. Each discipline has its own affordances. In some fields, like math, you can do cool things with a chalkboard. Audiences differ too. A good TED talk is different from a good colloquium. Most of my experience as an audience member has been at academic talks—mainly in philosophy, a little in psychology.

Some say the purpose of an academic talk is to “advertise the paper.” Others that “every talk is a job talk.” Fair enough—if you don’t have a permanent faculty position, go ahead and careermaxx. But that’s the speaker’s purpose. As someone watching and listening—rather than an eventual reader or a future search committee member—what matters is whether the talk is good in and of itself, not whether it complements a paper I’ll never read or steers a hiring decision I’ll never make. Does it inform, delight, entertain?

Take psychology, where the median talk is boring, deathly boring. (Oh you controlled for that potential confound, did you? Fascinating.) But the best psychology talks are outstanding. If the speaker confronts the big questions and handles them deftly, the talk reveals hidden parts of your very own self. (Simply be Paul Bloom.) It helps that their subject matter is, or can be, the universal human condition—the audience is already intimately familiar with the animating puzzle or problem. Some of the best philosophy talks are given by people who learned from psychologists how to make an audience care about a problem, before tendering a solution.

Philosophers have to work harder because their puzzles are usually more abstract. (That’s why the worst philosophy talks are worse than the worst psychology talks.) Some use gripping examples that invite the audience to inhabit the material. And the adept don’t present the paper, much less read it. The paper might not exist yet. The talk is its own way of thinking through the ideas.

The very best speakers don’t focus on the material itself. They focus on you, the audience, and they have such a deep grasp of the material that it just flows through them effortlessly. They aren’t giving a canned presentation. It feels spontaneous. Alive. They’re making eye contact, responding to nonverbal cues, using the space. (Simply be magnetic.) Talented speakers perform like comedians or actors. They take people up and down. They build tension and resolve it. As with good storytelling, they create an emotional arc. Like, they would never just end the whole thing abruptly.