Based on actual events. Don’t try these on your audiences. Please feel free to nominate the worst cases of audience abuse you have witnessed.
10. The speaker who comes out on stage and says, “Good Morning. . . . GOOD MORNING!. . . . I can’t hear you!. . . . GOOD MORNING!!!!. . . . Until the audience responds with a sufficiently loud form of that banal salutation to satisfy the speaker.
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…..”
7. The speaker who begins her talk with, “But first, let me tell you a little bit about me, my company, and how we got to this point….”
6. The (male) speaker who spends the entire 60 minutes talking to the attractive woman in the third row. (Or vice-versa.)
5. The speaker who talks down to the audience, saying, “You don’t need to understand this; suffice it to say that….”
4. The speaker who is so fascinated with his subject, say, the low-light hydroculture of Paeonia lactiflora, that he tells the audience everything he knows about it, believing that the audience is just as interested.
3. The speaker who begins her talk saying “I have 235 slides and only 30 minutes, so I’m going to move very fast. But don’t worry, I’m e-mailing the deck to everyone at the conference.”
2. The speaker who presents the results of the multi-year study….in total, on several hundred illegible slides, including the assumptions and statistical models used to analyze the data – and insists on going over every single slide.
1. The speaker who runs 20 minutes over time.
Connected to some of these, but by far the biggest sin I see (too often) are speakers who literally read the slides to the audience
I say “God bless ’em” because without speakers like that I would have no clients to train and I’d have to get a real job!
Chris — great point — so common that I was trying to suggest several forms of that abuse in #s 8, 4, and 2. Thanks for the comment.
The slide readers kill me — it shows both a poor use of a visual medium and a lack of respect to my intelligence.
Related to one of the above, I can’t stand the speakers whose lose track of time and try to cover their last twenty slides in two minutes. Practice, rehearse, get away from a dependence on slides (and demand that the organizers provide a stage clock).
Yes, and with slide readers you end up playing that horrible game of “Is he going to read the slide exactly or leave some of the words out?” A form of Inverse Bingo.
The Accelerating Speaker is another great one; though at least he/she does provide a little of the excitement of the chase — who will win, the clock, or the speaker?
Thanks, Eric, for these great additions!
Yes! I’ve seen all but #6. Maybe I’m just clueless.
I posted this pet peeve on my blog yesterday: The speaker who repeatedly tells the audience to “Write this down!” As though I don’t know for myself which notes are relevant to me.
Hi, Lisa —
Thanks for the great comment. Perhaps that speaker was a former teacher? My teachers were always telling me to ‘write this down’. But it shows a lack of faith (at the very least) in the audience’s ability to discriminate.
One big one you missed is typified by the CEO presenting the company financial results to investors and employees using exactly the same content. Another example is the same company overview to clients and new hires.
It is that mistaken belief that, because the subject is the same, the nature of the audience is totally irrelevant.
Hi, Gary —
Not considering your audience — yes. It should be logged in as the worst abuse case of all! Thanks for the great comment.