Major conferences of the (US) National Genealogical Society and Ontario Genealogical Society are coming up fast. In general I find the standard of presentation at genealogy conferences to be good, but there are always exceptions.
Nick Morgan on his Public Words blog provides a Top 10 List of Speakers Audience Abuse http://publicwords.typepad.com/nickmorgan/2010/04/the-top-10-list-of-speakers-audience-abuse.html.
You've likely suffered some of these which are my pet peeves:
9. The speaker who buries his head in a text, reading behind the podium, never once looking up to connect with the audience, for 10….30…..60 minutes.
8. The speaker who presents a dense slide of data to the audience, saying, “You can’t read this, but what this slide shows is…..”
5. The speaker who talks down to the audience.
3. The speaker who begins her talk saying “I have 235 slides and only 30 minutes, so I’m going to move very fast.
1. The speaker who runs 20 minutes over time.
He missed one of my favourites: the speaker who reads the slide to the audience.
ReplyDeleteAnd let's not forget the speaker who still uses transparencies and an overhead projector!
ReplyDeleteOn the other side of the podium, one of my pet peeves is the audience member who uses the question period as an opportunity to talk about his or her own ancestry ad nauseum....