Presentations & Publications: Know the Audience!

If a person gets nothing else out of a summer program like SPI, I would say understand suggestions on knowing to the audience you are presenting/submitting materials.

This week’s reading focused on presentation preparation. Between the suggestions of Day and Gastel, as well as the combined workshops, the key towards a successful presentation rests largely on preparation for the audience.

For instance, in one of my Master’s level seminars, presentations were given almost every week, but to an audience that was in the same major field as agricultural engineering. There was still a disconnect between myself and perhaps others whose presentations contained a lot of complex biochemistry which was difficult to understand. However, the purpose of this exercise was to hone presentation skills and for attending faculty and students to give constructive feedback. These presentations were open to the public.

It is difficult to argue Day and Gastel’s suggestions, but I do not think they are always universally applied. The idea that someone will never read your poster if you have a lot of text is rather absurd. As I understood the last conference I presented at, having a defined abstract on the poster was required. I would think that even less people read a conference booklet of abstracts than a poster any day.

Furthermore, being a STEM field, if you want to attract the academic attention, an appropriate title can be long, especially if you are trying to match research that you have published. One thing I think that was missed in both the reading and the combined workshop was that there is no magical formula for succeeding. It’s done in different ways all the time.

It would be unfair to ask Day and Gastel or anyone else to provide one. What was lost was that first and foremost, one must follow directions. The last presenter at the brown bag session hammered this point with fellowship applications, but it is also true of scholarship, graduate school and pretty much any other application. Admittedly, these directions can conflict with the some of the suggestions we’ve gotten from presentations or the reading. As Day and Gastel noted with their example of the researcher who thought his work did not need revision, he not only refused a revision but told the journal he was in the right; he was subsequently rejected.

A professor I knew made a joke at a conference once because someone in the audience fell asleep during his presentation (the joke was at the sleeper’s expense). He got a good reaction from the audience, but I’m not entirely sure if he was aware at the time that the person who was napping was one of the key conference organizers. Suffice to say, the professor wasn’t expecting another invite in the mail soon.

So know the audience before and during your submission or presentation!