Today I'm going to give you an overview of the basic tenets of bad speaking. You may think that speaking badly comes naturally, but it's really an art form. If you concentrate on these ideas instead of on your material, I guarantee that you'll give a bad talk. Before I start, I should mention that the original idea for this talk comes from Dave Patterson, one of the Berkeley faculty members and one of the people behind several major advances in Computer Science, including reduced instruction set computing (RISC) and redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID's). Let me put up the list of commandments. I'll go through each one and explain it, telling you when and why to use it, and what to do when you can't. [put up slide #1] I. THOU SHALT NOT BE NEAT. Why should you waste your valuable research time preparing slides? Spelling, grammar, and legibility are not important in a talk--anyone with half a brain is going to know what you mean, anyway. And even if the whole audience thinks your talk stinks, who cares? At most there will be 50 people. Compared to the 6.5 billion people in the world, those 50 are negligible. The exception to this commandment is your numbers. Numbers can sometimes be useful in belittling audience members who have the audacity to ask questions that you're not prepared to answer. For example, if someone gets up and asks, "Would you mind putting up that last slide again, please? I'm not sure I quite understood," you flip up this baby [put up slide #2] and respond, "How could you not understand my results? Look! 50, 100, 50, 100. We're twice as good." [remove slide] "I thought kindergarten was a prerequisite for this conference!" [put up slide #1 again] The second commandment is this: II. THOU SHALT NOT WASTE SPACE. Now I could have put all of these commandments on separate slides, each with an appropriate illustrative example, but just think about how much time and money I've saved by putting them all onto one slide. These little plastic things are maybe 35 cents each! That's three dollars and fifteen cents saved on just this talk! If you just can't figure out how to fill up the space on a slide, then cut the slide up into pieces that you can use. But don't throw those pieces away! When you need a larger piece, you may be able to make one by using two smaller pieces and a bit of scotch tape. [put up slide #3] Oh yeah, and another money saving tip. Re-use slides whenever you can. Just wipe off old pen marks and add new ones as you need them. This slide, for example, I've reused from another one of my talks for the third commandment, [put up slide #4] III. THOU SHALT NOT COVET BREVITY. Do you want to continue the stereotype that scientists can't write? Always use complete sentences on your slides, never just key words. If possible, use whole paragraphs and read every word [read from the slide--this should be on it]. Some of the worst talks I've ever seen were the ones where people just took their research paper, printed it on slides, and stuck them up on the screen. Think of the time that saved them over making new slides for the same material! When you're forced to make an exception to this rule, perhaps because you don't have enough slides to print your whole paper, you can either print just the odd pages (that way you get one with your name on it) or you can use lots of abbreviations and acronyms. Nothing is more fun for an audience than trying to decipher cryptic phrases in the short time that you keep them on the screen, and this kind of style adds that special air of mystery characteristic of so many bad talks, and indeed whole disciplines. Next, IV. THOU SHALT COVER THY NAKED SLIDES. There's nothing worse than an audience that doesn't have the sense to hang on your every word. Help them learn some manners and keep them from reading ahead: when you give your talk, use a sheet of paper to block off the part of the slide that you haven't reached [do it]. Once you get good at this technique, you can use a second sheet of paper to block off the parts you've already read, too [do it]. That way, the audience tries harder to follow what you're saying, because they know that once they fall behind, they might as well leave. Some people think that overlays are a good method if you need some suspense, but we all know that every overlay costs 35 cents. If you forget to bring a piece of paper, just turn the projector on and off as you read each sentence [do it]. This has the added advantage of making it hard for people to sleep while you're talking [do it a few times]. The fifth commandment is this: V. THOU SHALT NOT WRITE LARGE. Everyone knows that only conceited people write with large fonts. Be humble and use a small one. Besides, important people sit in the front of the room--why should you care about the riff-raff in the back? If they were important, they wouldn't be sitting way back there. The only time you'll want to use a large font is when you really have to hide something. [put up slide #5, read the blurb, and remove it] And number six: VI. THOU SHALT NOT USE COLOR. Flagrant use of color indicates uncareful research. It's also unfair to emphasize some words over others. [put up slide #6] But if you run out of black ink, make every word a different color. That way you make it exciting for the audience and fair to the words. But I'm forgetting the seventh commandment, [put back slide #1] VII. THOU SHALT NOT ILLUSTRATE. Confucius says, "A picture = 10K words," but Dijkstra says, "Pictures are for weak minds." Who are you going to believe, wisdom from the ages or the person who first counted goto's? If you have to use illustrations, use them to pass extra time. [put up slide #7, pause a little (not too much)] Just make sure that you remove them before the audience can reach the punch line. [remove slide #7] After all, you wouldn't want anyone to think that the illustration is more interesting than your research. The eighth commands: VIII. THOU SHALT NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT. You should avert your eyes to show respect for your audience. Eye contact does nothing to help you make your points, and can only succeed in making your audience uneasy. It can be used, however, to quiet pesky members of the audience. If someone raises a hand, for example, stare directly at them and continue speaking. Eventually the person will take the hint. Keeping people from asking questions is very important because it may interfere with your ability to follow the next commandment, [put back slide #1] IX. THOU SHALT NOT SKIP SLIDES IN A LONG TALK. You prepared the slides, and people came for your talk...your WHOLE talk [talk faster]. So just talk faster. The ones in front will be able to keep up anyway, and who cares about the ones in back? If you absolutely positively have to skip something, say because someone is going to throw you out of the room in the next five minutes and you have another twenty slides, then skip your summary and conclusions. They should be obvious from the other slides anyway, and if someone can't follow the other slides, that's their own problem, now isn't it? [talk normally again] Also regarding style of speech, X. THOU SHALT SPEAK NEITHER LOUDLY NOR CLEARLY. As I've stressed throughout this talk, the important people sit in the front. You could strain your voice if you try to speak loudly enough for the people in back. If a mic is provided, don't use it. Using a mic can be very risky--you might be subjected to that awful feedback noise, for example. Why should you risk such an annoyance just so the people who came late can hear you? Let them read the slides! And, just like the loss of that other Eleventh Commandment can be blamed for the eventual decline and fall of Western Civilization, failure to follow this eleventh commandment can result in bringing your efforts to naught and making your hard-earned bad talk into a good one. XI. THOU SHALT NOT PRACTICE. Why waste your research time practicing a talk? It could take several whole hours out of only a few years of research. How can you appear spontaneous if you practice? If someone forces you to practice, make sure that your audience understands that you only want praise by arguing with each and every comment offered, no matter how small. Also, make sure that your talk is longer than the time allotted. After all, your work is much more important than anyone else's. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Slide #1: The ten (or eleven) commandments, written by hand, in black ink. Start out fairly neatly, but use more than 1/10th of the sheet. Get messier and messier, and eventually force yourself to squeeze the last few into a tiny amount of space. These last few should be completely illegible. Slide #2: A line graph with multiple lines in black. Axes should be unlabeled or marked with something completely meaningless. Lines should cross over in many places, and the data should generally be unintelligible. In some clear space on the slide, write "50," and in another space, write, "100." Slide #3: A short bit of text in black ink, written upon two small pieces of plastic taped together unevenly. The part on the tape should be smudged, but that will probably not require any effort. :) Slide #4: Print out the section of this document including the third commandment, smudge it with black ink clouds, and make some strange markings on it. Alternatively, just put up a page from a real research paper with the same preparation. The page should have something that you can use for commandment four, so make sure that a section header or two appears on the page. Better yet, enscript some text for a really small font. Slide #5: A double bar graph labeled #1, #2, etc. on the x-axis and "Quality Factor" on the y-axis. The left bars should be "Us" (in a legend?) and the right bars should be "Them." The left bar in the leftmost set should be about 1% larger than the right bar, and both should reach to about the middle of the graph. The heights of the other bars should vary in size, but in all cases, the right bar should be between significantly and obscenely larger than the left. In very large handwriting across the top of the slide, write "Ours beats theres by a whole %!" [sic] Complete it with an arrow to the leftmost pair of bars. Slide #6: Write the text from commandment six on a slide with each word in a new color. If your graphics package makes it hard to properly align text with different characteristics, it's even better. Slide #7: Put one or a few Calvin & Hobbes or other good comic strip (with permission from the copyright holder, of course...). If you use C&H, I suggest either something about a term paper or a show-and-tell episode.