THE DEADLY SINS - LionsDen Communications · 2018. 9. 3. · The 7 Deadly Sins of Scientific Presentations (and how to avoid them) 4 The Italian politician Machiavelli said ‘information

7DEADLYSINS

of Scientific Presentations(and how to avoid them)

John Clare

T H E

www.lionsdencommunications.com

The 7 Deadly Sins of Scientific Presentations (and how to avoid them)

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This e-book is a summary of the key points that you need to embrace to make you a very good presenter. They come from the 22 years I have spent coaching scientists and medics to do just that. The book is deliberately short. You can read it in your lunch break. It’s short but useful. As somebody said about a bikini:

Long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to be interesting.

With the guidance in this book, I hope your presentations will be the same.

To learn more you can come on a LionsDen training programme, or take my online course:

http://www.lionsdencommunications.com/new-on-line-learning-from-lions-den

Everything in this e-book is covered in more detail in my highly acclaimed (and much longer) printed book, Communicating Clearly about Science and Medicine, published by Gower/Ashgate. You can buy it from their site, or Amazon. Or at a discount from the LionsDen site:

http://www.lionsdencommunications.com/communicating-clearly-about-science-and-medicine

One other point before we get into the detail: Although this book concentrates on scientific talks, the lessons in it are relevant to any presentation on any topic, and to all kinds of verbal communication, not just when you stand on a stage and click on a PowerPoint file.

A message from John Clare

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Before you read any further, stop and think about the title of this e-book.

The 7 deadly sins of scientific presentations.

I bet you already have an idea what they are. You may not be able to list them as precisely as I have, but you know the difference between a very good presentation and a bad one. Before you go further, think about the presentations you see, and those that you make. Write down what you think are the seven most common, or most serious, failings.

By doing that, you’ll already be thinking about your presentations. You may be doing this for the first time.

When I ask scientists and medics how much time they spend preparing their presentation, they often say they

have no time at all to do that.

They concentrate on the research, the data or the publication of it. The presentation is just an afterthought… and even then, it usually means ‘looking through the slides’.

That’s the first failing. When people learn about your exciting research, your breakthroughs and triumphs, they probably do so through a presentation or a media interview, rather than a publication in a scientific journal. And presentations require different skills. That’s what this e-book will give you: the essence of making great data presentations.

The seven deadly sinsThere are three main phases in making a presentation:

• Preparation• Illustration• Delivery

The sins are found among all of them. As we go through them, think about your own presentations, and where you are guilty of the sins…and read my tips on how to avoid them.

Pause for thought



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The Italian politician Machiavelli said ‘information is power’. In the scientific world, the same is true. However, when you are presenting, information alone is not enough.

For a great presentation, information isnecessary but not sufficient.

In fact, too much information can be a hindrance to clear communication.

In the world of scientific presentations,communication is power.

Think of the great presenters you have seen. Not just on the podium at a congress, but on TV or the internet. If you’re not familiar with their work, look up Hans Rosling of the Karolinska Instititute, Sweden, Oxford’s Marcus du Sautoy or Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, who has built a worldwide following with his podcasts Physics for Future Presidents. What makes these people remarkable as presenters? Not just their level of knowledge and experience. It’s their ability to communicate that sets them apart.

Information is not communication.

Sin #1: Too much information

“I know so much I don’t know where to begin!”

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The learned professor in the cartoon is typical of many scientific presenters. He can’t see the wood for the trees. He is incapable of sorting through his information and developing a presentation with a compelling narrative structure that will engage his audience. He is too close to his subject. As well as not knowing where to begin, he also doesn’t know where to stop!

The American actor Woody Allen summed up the problem of knowing too much when he was interviewed about making movies:

“The problem with being the writer, producer, director and lead actor, as I am, is that I think it’s all brilliant. That’s why I need someone I trust, to tell me what works and what doesn’t. They also have to say ‘Stop! That’s enough!” Woody Allen

Information v Communication

Information is what the1960s TV detective Joe Friday would have called, ‘Just the facts, Ma’am.’ Communication means you have taken those facts and delivered them in a different way. If you have communicated successfully you will have:

• Prioritised the information to suit the audience.• Added to the data on the slides by explaining

key points.• Put the new information into context with the old.• Told them why it matters and what it means to them.• Been honest about weaknesses and unanswered questions

of the study.• Told them what you want them to do about it.

Too much detailSome presenters try to cover too much, so the scope of their talk is too wide. With others, the problem is the opposite: They give too of the fine detail, so their scope is too narrow. The scope of your talk depends largely on your audience.

Too much detail and you will lose them.Not enough information,

and you will leave them frustrated.

The ideal balance is what we call The Goldilocks Option… just the right amount of information and detail. Your job is to be like Golidilocks, and decide what’s just right.



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All of the sins in this e-book are deadly, meaning your presentation will fail if you commit them. However, ignoring the needs of the audience is probably the most common. We all know the Key Opinion Leaders who have one presentation which they deliver around the world, irrespective of the audience. Some of them, if they are given a shorter time slot than usual, appear to think they can just talk faster and it will be fine! The idea of tailoring it to the audience never occurs to them.

I have sat in many presentations, among an audience of hundreds, wondering how many of them are following the presentation. There’s usually no doubt that the speaker is an expert. The problem is that he (men are more likely to commit this sin than women, in my experience) has not given any thought to the audience’s needs.

Writing a presentation without having an audience in mind is like

writing a love letter and addressing it‘To whom it may concern’.

Here’s the question to ask yourself when you start to prepare your presentation:

Why should these people listen to me talking about this now? What does it mean to them, and how will it

change their lives/practice/understanding?

Imagine the question is on a website. As you pass your mouse pointer over key words, hyperlinks appear. Here it is again with the hyperlinks highlighted, and points for you to consider.

Why should these people listen to me talking about this now? What does it mean to them, and how will

it change their lives/practice/understanding?

‘Why…’The key question: What are they expecting from your talk? What do you want them to do after they have heard you?

‘…these people…’Answer these questions about the audience. Who are they and what is their interest in your presentation? What is their level of understanding

Sin #2: Ignoring the audience’s needs

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of your topic? How familiar are they with what you regard as common concepts?

‘…me talking…’What expertise and experience do you bring to the table? Are you an acknowledged authority on this topic? Do you have some unique insight? Have you conducted new research, or approached the subject differently? What can you tell them by talking to them that they could not learn from reading about your research in a publication?

‘…now…’Why now? What is in your talk that you could not have told them previously? What’s new or different? Have you pulled together a number of other strands of research that had previously seemed separate? Have you filled in some missing link? How has your talk taken the subject forward?

‘… mean to them… change their lives/practice/ understanding …’The ultimate question: What’s the point? What do you want them to do after they have heard your talk? Put your research into practice immediately? Start treating patients differently? Realise that side effects can be prevented or managed by a new practice? Monitor for problems earlier? Use a new diagnostic? Understand why something is harder/easier than previously thought? Only you can decide… and you must spell it out for them.

Emotional v intellectual audiencesImagine that every audience is on a scale between the two extremes of emotional and intellectual. You need to know how to appeal to them. Here is the technique:

To appeal to the emotions, be specific.

Give them a surprising case study illustrating success or failure. Use an anecdote.

To appeal to the intellect, be general.

Give them the big picture, based on data. Show them the statistics.

In reality, very few audiences are entirely emotional or intellectual… most are somewhere on the scale between the two extremes. However, most of them will tend towards one end of the other. This approach will allow you to tailor your talk as needed, or to include both techniques appropriately.



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Sin #3: Dense or confusing slides.

Slides are an integral part of any data presentation, so it is surprising how often they are unreadable, unclear or just confusing. Slides are a type of what we used to call ‘visual aids’. (Others would include video, props, flipcharts and interactive software for audience voting and Q&A sessions.) I still like that phrase because it gives us a clue to their appearance and their role.

‘Visual’ means they should be easy to understand. ‘Aid’ means they should help you to tell your story, and the audience to understand it. Sadly, both of these rules are broken, probably millions of times every day in presentations around the world.

Let’s take a step back from the design of slides and consider their role. Slides are generally produced on PowerPoint, so let me ask you:

Are you missing the point of PowerPoint?

It’s there to help you illustrate your key points.

Your talk should be easier to understand with slides than it is without them. Otherwise, don’t use them.

You can’t design the slides until you are clear about the narrative flow of your presentation. When I work with a presenter, helping them to prepare for a talk at an important meeting, they usually start by showing me the slides on their computer. I ask them to put it to one side, and tell me the story first. We spend some time working out the story, developing the narrative. When we have agreed that, then… and only then… can we put the slides together.

Try this approach yourself.

When you begin to prepare a new presentation, don’t start with the slides. Start with a piece of paper

and work out the story flow.

I use a technique called Mind Mapping. It forces me to get my ideas down, then arrange them into a narrative. Try to step back from your data, and imagine you are telling it as a story to an intelligent but inexperienced audience. Develop the narrative first, then turn your attention to the slides.

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Think of your slides as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece has a job to do, and when put together they create a clear picture of your research. However, the puzzle analogy breaks down in this important point:

Each data slide should be understandable if viewed in isolation.

There are very few exceptions to this rule.

When you are putting your slides together, think of these rules:

• Every slide should have a clear message.

• Every slide should have a clear title, which summarises the content where possible. For example, ‘Statins reduce cardiovascular (CV) events’ is better than ‘Relationship between statin use and CV events.’

• Every element on the slide should be necessary and clear.

• The whole deck should have a logical flow.

• Keep text to a minimum and make it large enough to read from the back.

• Use clearly differentiated colours to differentiate key elements.

• Backgrounds and templates should be uncluttered, with only minimal logos and other identifiers.

• The design of the slides should be consistent For example, the same colour for the active compound, comparator and placebo throughout the whole set.

• Lines and curves should be thick enough to stand out, and clearly differentiated by colour.

• Spell out unfamiliar abbreviations.

• Keep references on the slide to a minimum.

• Add arrows or boxes to highlight key points, for example, difference on Kaplan-Meier curves.

There is much more on this, with great examples of good and bad slides, in my book Communicating Clearly about Science and Medicine. It’s available from the Gower publishers site, through Amazon in printed or electronic form, or click here for a discount voucher:




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Sin #4: Letting the slides run the show

Your slides are a part of your presentation. But they are not the presentation. Many scientists, so used to relying on information to make their way in the world, almost make themselves invisible when they stand at a podium. They let their slides do the talking. Essentially, they just read out the words on the slides.

This is one of the main ways to guarantee losing your audience. They will quickly understand what is happening, and, as they can read faster than you can talk, will quickly switch off. Here’s the key point:

If the words on the screen are the same as those coming out of your mouth, we don’t need them both.

If all you are going to do is read the slides to the audience, just send them the slides and save the air fare. 25,000 physicians and their associates don’t attend the American Heart Association or the European Cancer Congress just to watch people reading slides aloud!

A great presentation is a coming together of the presenter, the slides (and their content) and the audience.

To achieve this, you need to add to the information on the slides. There are many to so this. You can comment on, highlight, contextualise, elaborate or explain. Most importantly, you need to interact with your slides, rather than read them. Here are some techniques for doing that

Pause and Introduce the SlideYou are very familiar with your slides, but each one comes as a surprise to your audience. Once you move to a new slide, the first thing you must do is to pause and explain the layout. This is particularly important in the early part of the presentation, when you are familiarising them with the look as well as the content. You need to explain the axes, the scales and the colours.

Tell them what’s important… and add to itHowever much we try to simplify them, some scientific and medical slides still end up looking quite complicated. Building up a slide with animation can help here, but even then, you need to tell the audience what is important.

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Use phrases like;

‘If you look here… This is the key point…’ ‘This is what surprised us most… this is the best news for patients/physicians.’

Sometimes an audience who are unfamiliar with the details need help to understand whether a big or a small number is beneficial, or whether a reading should go up or down. Some trials aim for both, for example you may want to increase some values (eg HDL cholesterol) reduce others (eg LDL cholesterol) and normalise a third (eg Blood Pressure).

If your audience don’t immediately understand which numbers need to go up, down and stay the same, they won’t get the point of your talk. There’s a simple way to make sure they understand… tell them! Make it clear what you are aiming to do, and what success would look like when measured on this parameter.

Use the ColoursThis is a simple but powerful technique. Refer to the curves, lines or bars by the colours. Say things like, ‘Remember the blue line here is the agent we were investigating, and the yellow line is the control group. As you see, the blue is above the yellow one all the way through the trial…good news for the new agent…’

Use Signposts and triggersA signpost is where you make it clear that one section of the talk is ending and a new one is beginning. For example, ‘So that’s the data on the drug’s effect on the liver. There has been some concern expressed about potential effects on the kidneys, and that is where I would like to turn now.’ Then, and only then, do you reveal the next slide, on kidney effects.

It’s important to do it in this order, because the audience will concentrate on what you are saying for those few important seconds. If you reveal the slide then say it, they will be trying to figure out what’s on the slide, and may miss what you say. I call this ‘triggering’ the next slide.

Try to use these techniques in your next presentation, and you’ll see an immediate improvement… and your audience will be grateful!



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Sin #5: No performance element

In the introduction I asked you to think about the great presenters and communicators you have seen in action, and consider what makes them so successful. One factor which sets them aside from the rest is this:

Good presenters understand that a good presentation demands a performance.

I’ve been privileged to work with some truly inspirational scientific presenters over the years, and without exception they have all been performers. Experts in their subject, in command of their material, confident on stage and showing a real passion for their field… yes, they have been all of these things. And all of them are illustrated by their performance in front of an audience.

The type of the performance varies hugely. One professor I know is an expert in diabetes and its treatment. When he presents, he uses an array of props including slabs of lard to illustrate weight gain, bags of sugar to represent blood glucose, a pint of beer and a jug of what is meant to look like urine (where the glucose is excreted), though in reality it is coloured water. His presentations are startlingly effective, entertaining, and a model of clarity. This unconventional method works for him.

Others I know dominate the stage with their big personalities. Some are more thoughtful. Some (particularly women, as it seems to be a female trait) are disarmingly self-deprecating. One (male) academic uses a different type of presentation software, and talks the audience through his story by drawing circles around key points on his slides with an electronic pen, like a TV sports analyst. Another builds his entire presen-tation around questions to the audience. The tactics vary, but they are all putting in a performance. They are all keyed up, and ready to go from the moment they walk to the podium.

What do I mean by a performance? First, you have to be true to yourself.

There’s no point trying to be a talk show host or a TV evangelist if you are the strong, silent type. So be yourself… but be the most energetic, dynamic version of yourself. The one that engages people, captures their attention and holds it. We all have different versions of ourselves…


the ‘me’ that is with my family, chilling out watching TV at home, is dif-ferent from the one that is hosting a drinks party, ensuring everyone has a good time. Neither of them are quite the same as the ‘me’ that steps onto the stage at an international conference. Underneath, I am the same person, but I tailor it to the situation.

‘Presenter Me’ is, I hope, the most dynamic, energetic and authoritative ‘me’. I will be keyed up, finely attuned to the nuances of any comments from the audience. I will be respectful of them, but try to keep up the pace and energy of my section of the event. When I’m presenting I’m aware of being ‘on’ from the moment the chair starts to introduce me.

In the planning process before I am going to present at a conference, the organisers often ask, ‘Could you send me your presentation?’ I reply: ‘No, but I could send you the slides.’ The ‘presentation’ is made up of me and my visual aids (which usually includes slides, but also flip-charts, video and props). My performance is an integral part of that. You should aim for the same.

The Elements of a performanceThere are three main elements of a performance:

• Voice• Body Language• Content

VoiceThis is probably the most underestimated aspect of any presentation. In fact, many people ignore it completely. That’s a mistake. Think of how a good radio presenter or interviewee holds your attention with just their voice. Your presentation needs to do the same:

For much of the time, people watch a presentation with their ears.

Think about your own experience when you are in the audience. For most of the time you’re probably looking at the slides and listening to the presenter. The voice in this case becomes the primary instrument of communication. Most presenters never hear themselves presenting. You should.

Here’s a great exercise, guaranteed to improve your vocal technique:

Record your presentation rehearsal on video. Play back the sound only, so you can hear but not see it.

Analyse your performance.



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This exercise isolates your voice. How do you sound? If someone was listening to you, would they find your voice engaging, interesting and dynamic? Does your voice hold their attention? Ask yourself, ‘Would I want to listen to them?’ If not, you need to work on your voice.

Helping somebody improve their voice or body language needs specific tips, depending on how they perform individually. However, here are some general tips:

• Speak slightly more slowly and clearly than you would normally. It adds gravitas, and is particularly important when English is not the first language of many in the audience.

• Speak slightly more slowly and deliberately than normal. It adds gravitas.

• Avoid speaking in a monotone, or falling into a predictable pattern of speech.

• Vary your pace, speed and pitch.

• Pauses are powerful. They add emphasis and time for a thought to sink in.

• Smile…it shows in your voice.

Body Language

Record your presentation rehearsal on video. Play it back with the sound turned off.

Analyse your performance.

This exercise isolates your body language. Ask yourself, ‘Does this person look dynamic, interesting and engaging? Would I want to listen to them?’ If not, you need to change your style.

Some scientific presenters believe that body language doesn’t matter, and that the science should speak for itself. In my view this is misguided. I have taught presentation skills to thousands of scientists and medics all over the world, and almost without exception they have agreed that presenting the data in a lively, interesting fashion is better than doing so without any thought for the style and the audience. Body language is a key element of that.


Your body language needs to convey confidence, authority and ease with the material. It needs to suggest that you are the expert, you regard it as a privilege to speak to them today and would be delighted to help the audience out with any questions they may have. You also need to look and sound interested and enthusiastic!

To fully understand what steps you need to take, I would need to see you on video. You can do that on a LionsDen course. For now, here are some tips:

• When you get to the podium, pause, look at the audience and smile. It builds anticipation.

• Your first words should exude self-confidence. The session chair has usually been complimentary about you, and returning the compliment is often a great start… but be very brief.

• When speaking in a large auditorium, use big, expansive gestures rather than small deliberate ones.

• Look at the audience throughout your talk. Try to establish eye contact with people at the back, the front and in the corner seats.

• Talk to the audience, not the screen.

• Be careful how you use the laser pointer… it can pull your head (and voice) towards the screen and away from the audience.

• Pause after a particularly important point… to let it sink in, and add emphasis.

ContentMost of the points I have covered so far have focussed on the content, so I don’t plan to repeat them here.



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Sin #6: Boring openings

Imagine you are at a medical or scientific conference, or other important meeting. When a new speaker takes the stage, how long does it take you to decide whether they are going to be interesting? You can find lots of interesting psychological research reported about this, with answers ranging from a fraction of a seconds to half a minute. However, that’s mainly aimed at people going for job interviews or on blind dates. Surely that’s not relevant to our world of scientific presentations? Well, yes and no.

Of course a speaker at a scientific meeting gets longer than a few seconds to make a favourable impression, but the concept remains valid.

You only get one chance to make a first impression… so make sure it’s a good one.

The British athlete Linford Christie won the 100 metre gold medal at the Barcelona Olympics. He dedicated the medal to his coach with the words, ‘He got me to go from the B of the Bang.’ Going from the ‘B of the Bang’ of the starting gun is clearly crucial for Olympic sprinters, but what is the equivalent for scientific presenters?

In the last section I spoke of how the right body language can help to make a good first impression. Then, having caught the audience’s attention, you need to keep it. Earlier I discussed how your voice is crucial in doing that. The content is even more important. You need to start with an attention grabber.

When I work with presenters, I urge them to think very hard about their opening. You should do the same.

I have a number of potential openings to suit different audiences, and I’m always inventing new ones. I often start by asking questions about what they like and dislike about presenting, getting the audience to raise their hands in response. This has the added benefit of giving me an indication of their own presenting experience.

Sometimes I start with a photograph of Albert Einstein, and his quote from earlier:

‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler…Einstein said that. That includes scientific presentations. And the


accompanying slides. Where is ‘as simple as possible, but not too simple? The answer, when you are presenting, is up to you. The best answer depends on many things.., the complexity of the subject, the knowledge and interest of the audience, the length of your talk. Only you can decide. In the next half-hour I want to help you to do that, so you can deliver talks that really resonate with your audiences.’

Another of my favourite openings is to tell a story about my Dad and his refusal to give up smoking until one day I showed him a TV interview I did with a professor, about how soon people would feel the benefit, even in their 60s. That leads me to my first key point, that ‘Information is not communication.’

Given my role as a presentation coach, I make a lot of presentations. This gives me the opportunity to try things out, and judge the audience’s reaction. I do that all the time, to ensure my talks remain fresh. You should do the same.

Don’t just come up with one opener and stick with it. Develop a number, for different situations.

I’ve seen a lot of excellent attention-grabbing openers…and some very bad ones. The bad ones have usually failed because they didn’t engage the audience, or worse, they illustrated that the presenter hasn’t taken the trouble to find out who the audience are, and what they need.

Here are some of the best openers I have seen or helped to develop:

Example 1:I want you to think differently about blood pressure. When the doctor or nurse takes yours, they express it in two numbers, one over the other…systolic over diastolic. My research suggests that what matters most is the systolic pressure, that’s the top number, and the difference between the two, known as the pulse pressure. Let me show you the evidence. First let me explain why I think this can help all physicians who are faced with hypertensive patients…

Example 2:Einstein said a problem correctly defined was 90 per cent solved. So there was much excitement when the Harvard professor Judah Folkman first worked out how tumours attract blood vessels so they can take nutrients from the body, which allows them to grow and eventually spread. He called the process angiogenesis. That sounded pretty cool, as it allowed us to concentrate on preventing that process. How hard can that be?



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Much harder than we thought, because angiogenesis is really clever and involves a number of different processes. You cut off one, and other take up the slack. Our new type of drug aims to cut them all off at the same time…

Example 3:When I was a child, we thought that in the future, space travel would be commonplace, most menial tasks would be done by robots, and nobody would die of disease because we would have cured everything. As we know, it didn’t turn out like that…at least, not yet. I don’t know what happened to the rockets and the robots, but disease and serious illness are definitely still with us. The problem is, we don’t have enough money to treat all the people who need it. Resources are precious. So I want to start my talk with a question:

Why should we give liver transplants to alcoholics, lung transplants to smokers, and perform cardiac surgery on people who refuse to lose weight? Isn’t it a waste of those precious resources? No it isn’t. I want to talk about exactly why we should do those things, because that’s why we have a national health service…

All these intros are attention-grabbing. They are also relevant to the audience, and provide a lead into the main topic. You need to work out your own which are appropriate to you and your audiences. Here are some techniques:

Bold StatementMake a statement which is not only bold, but makes them think. It may be a prediction about where their field of science will be in 10 or 20 years, or a positive statement about how much progress has been made in the last decade.

QuestionAsk them to speculate on your specialist subject, or ask a question with a surprising answer.

Suprising StatisticSomething to make them think about their subject in a different way. For example: ‘According to the international guidelines, almost everybody with asthma should have normal or near-normal lung function, should never or hardly ever be admitted to hospital due to an exacerbation, and can all lead a normal life. Why is it, then, that this year 250,000 people around the world will die of asthma?’


A word pictureDescribe a challenging case, or a typical patient. Get them to imagine themselves in the situation you are describing for them. Then make reference to that fact, for example ‘I think everybody in this hall has been in that situation…’

An anecdoteA classic way of starting a talk. Tell an interesting anecdote, make sure it’s relevant to the audience, and use it as a way of leading in to your main presentation.

A quoteQuotes are a very good starting point, particularly if they come from somebody who has a great reputation in the audience’s community. Quotes from learned societies and academic bodies can also be a good start.

A propIllustrate your talk in a novel way. Bring in an out of date piece of surgical equipment and tell a story about it. (I once saw a presenter do this with a penile vacuum pump that was used to treat erectile dysfunction before Viagra was developed. A surprising number of the audience didn’t know what it was.). Or use a non-medical everyday object to illustrate your point. See here for Professor Hans Rosling describing global challenges using Lego bricks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxbprY



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Sin #7: Weak endings

The two most important parts of any presentation are the beginning and the end. The twin concepts of primacy and recency ensure that the first and last things we hear stay with us longest. In the previous section I discussed the importance of a strong beginning, and when you are planning your talk I urged you to ‘Start with the end in mind’. Now I want to add to that:

Start well, finish strongToo many of the talks I see don’t really end at all… they just dribble away. Sometimes they just stop. They end in the words of TS Eliot, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’

There is a well-tried technique for communicating effectively:

Tell them what you are going to say Say it

Tell them what you saidThe end of your talk offers a great opportunity to ‘Tell them what you said’. This technique guarantees that your talk has a strong narrative structure, like a finely-tuned argument or scientific proof. I love the elegance of a talk where the end reflects the beginning. But there is more to it than that. ‘Telling them what you said’ repeats and stresses your key point, at a time when your audience are most receptive because you have just presented your arguments to them.

In the examples of strong openings, the respective strong endings might have been:

Example 1:So I hope that in the last 20 minutes I have encouraged you to think differently about blood pressure. I hope I have demonstrated that the systolic pressure is what matters, rather than the traditional fraction of systolic over diastolic, and that the difference between the two, known is pulse pressure, is a good indicator of cardiovascular health. Now we have a few minutes for questions….’

Example 2:I set out today to show you that angiogenesis is far more complicated than we thought when it was first identified 44 years ago. We now know it involves three main processes which can all compensate for


the others… so it is necessary to block all three of them to have a chance of preventing tumour growth. Our new compound is the first one to block all three. There is still a long way to go, but I hope you can see why we believe it offers promise in the treatment of solid tumours. Now we have time for questions…’

Example 3:To summarise… there is much debate about where to invest the precious resources of our health services. It’s sometimes claimed that they should not be spent on patients who have, in some people’s minds, only themselves to blame for their health problems. I don’t believe we should divide people into the ‘guilty sick’ and the ‘innocent sick’. I believe everyone is deserving of the best case we can provide. That’s why I became a doctor. I hope you agree with me, and would be happy to discuss it further in the time we have left…’

There are three elements to the end of your talk:

SummaryThe pulling together of your key points, as outlined above.

ConclusionWhat your talk means to the audience. If I put on my journalistic hat I would ask ‘What’s the point?’. So if your data means there is now a new treatment option for patients with XYZ condition, that’s the point. If it means that patients can now be diagnosed earlier, more accurately or more reliably, that’s it. Or maybe your new drug is the first once-a-day treatment, which means compliance will be better. Whatever it is, the conclusion should spell out the benefit, rather than the feature.

ActionOf all the sins it is possible to commit in presentations, this is probably the most common.

You need to tell them what you want them to do.Sales and marketing people call this the CTA, the Call To Action. Failing to include it is a serious failing in their world. You may think ‘Well yes, that’s OK for them, but I’m a doctor, or a scientist. I don’t want to get involved in selling.’ I have news for you. You are already involved in selling. You may not be selling products or drugs, but you need to sell your ideas. And you need to end it with what you want the audience to do. In fact, as the expert in the subject, you have a duty to tell them.

So if your data demonstrates that there is now an effective oral treatment for disease XYZ for the first time, tell your audience that you would like them to consider prescribing it for suitable patients. If it



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suggests a new drug is not safe for patients with renal failure, suggest they avoid them. If your conclusion is that you now need to run a large multi-centre trial, ask them to enrol patients in it.

ConclusionI hope you’ve enjoyed this e-book and found the techniques useful. I expect you have recognised that you have, at least occasionally, committed some of the sins. I’m certain you have seen other presenters doing so. I said in the last section that you need to end on a Call To Action. So here’s mine:

Start putting the techniques into action as soon as possible.

For a video refresher of some of the tips outlined here, take a look at my latest video tutorials:

http://www.lionsdencommunications.com/two-minutes-with-john-clare

To get more tips on becoming a great presenter, buy my book, Communicating Clearly about Science and Medicine. It’s available from the Gower publishing website, or from the LionsDen site:


The best way to improve your presentation skills is by personal coaching, face to face. To learn more about how to book a personalised LionsDen training course with me, click here:

http://www.lionsdencommunications.com


About the authorJohn Clare is a presentation and communication coach with an international reputation in the fields of health, medicine and science. He has flown over a million miles (so far) to help thousands of scientists, physicians and executives of pharmaceutical companies become better presenters.

He is the chief executive of LionsDen Communications, the company he founded in 1992 after a career in journalism.

He is the author of a number of books, including:

Communicating Clearly about John Clare’s Guide Science and Medicine to Media Handling

Patents, Patients and Profits: Organ Farm: Media Reporting of the The story of pig-to- Pharmaceutical Industry human transplants

Documents

THE DEADLY SINS - LionsDen Communications · 2018. 9. 3. · The 7 Deadly Sins of Scientific Presentations (and how to avoid them) 4 The Italian politician Machiavelli said ‘information