Time to practice and practice to time.

I find presentations an awful lot of work to prepare for. Some fellow post-grads reckon I make work for myself. There’s certainly a difference in expectations of what giving a talk should mean. For example I was at a conference where speakers had 20 minutes to talk. One guy was delivering his talk and when his time was up he’d only just got to the main part of the talk. He was shown a red card and noted it saying, “I’ll just finish up” – and sailed on.

After ten minutes there was quite a tussle. “We’re pressed for time”

“Yes I know, there’s just a couple of points I’d like to make.” and the talk continued.

A couple of months later I was talking with some people who’d attended the same talk and I mentioned how bizarre the timekeeping was. One agreed, noting that the guy hadn’t had a yellow card at seventeen minutes to warn him his time was almost up. This floored me. My thoughts were that surely it would have been clear during the rehearsals that the talk was far too long. This in turn was considered utterly strange. The paper had been written, what would be the point of rehearsals? My comment that if I want to be comfortable with a talk I have to practice it for at least a couple of days was considered the height of madness (I’m not rich enough to be eccentric).

If I’m giving a talk I have to practice because my opinion is you can only give a truly awful talk if you exceed your slot. If you’re punctual the worst you can be is merely very bad. I’m pondering whether to practice my work-in-progress seminar. There’s no urgent need to hit a deadline as I won’t be taking the talk to a conference. On the other hand it’s usually a good to get into the habit of being clear and concise.

Additionally I also struggle with the concept that a presentation is someone reading from a paper, but that’s partly because I don’t have the talent to do that. My solution was to try and improve my acting skills. Keith Johnstone‘s book Impro was useful. I’ve only just noticed by visiting his website he’s written another book Impro for Storytellers.