{"id":138,"date":"2014-06-24T14:43:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-24T14:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ffolliet.com\/staging\/2014\/06\/24\/its-just-not-scientific\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T11:15:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T11:15:18","slug":"its-just-not-scientific","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ffolliet.com\/staging\/its-just-not-scientific\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s just not scientific&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\">Recently I shared ideas with a colleague about presentations and she significantly altered the supportive media (p2) of her upcoming presentation. She was very pleased with her performance and the reception of the presentation by the audience (p cubed) but the feedback from a senior colleague was that, &#8220;there are rules that have to be followed when making a scientific presentation&#8221; and implied that it was a poor presentation.<\/span><\/p>\n<div><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\"><br \/><\/span><\/div>\n<div><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\">I&#8217;ve done a fair amount of searching and &nbsp;what I can find are a series of diktats citing numbers such &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.guykawasaki.com\/2005\/12\/the_102030_rule.html\" target=\"_blank\">30-20-10<\/a>&#8221; or &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.gcflearnfree.org\/2011\/01\/25\/simple-dos-and-donts-for-better-powerpoint-presentations\/\" target=\"_blank\">5-5-5<\/a>&#8221; as means to produce a &#8220;scientific&#8221; presentation. What I cannot find is evidence that this is effective or that it is &#8220;scientific&#8221; any more than a white coat denotes a scientist. What does exist is a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pmc\/articles\/PMC3398435\/\" target=\"_blank\">mountain of evidence<\/a> that such presentations contravene many simple psychological principles and are thus much less effective than they might be.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\">Designing a talk around the needs of the audience and a message rather than a list of information is scientifically proven to be a much better way to engage with an audience and have retention of information. Reducing the amount of text on slides and illustrating with appropriate supportive media is scientifically proven to be better than text heavy slides doubling as an handout. Engaging with the audience in the delivery (p3) because the speaker is freed from the restriction of the scripted, bulletpointed list is scientifically proven to improve audience retention of information.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\">All of this may not look like old fashioned, &#8220;scientific&#8221; presentations but if it works better because of the science, isn&#8217;t it about time we changed our view of what a scientist looks like?<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\"><br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ffolliet.com\/staging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/mad_scientist-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><span style=\"font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"https:\/\/ffolliet.com\/staging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/mad_scientist-1.jpg\" height=\"584\" width=\"640\" \/><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I shared ideas with a colleague about presentations and she significantly altered the supportive media (p2) of her upcoming presentation. She was very pleased with her performance and the reception of the presentation by the audience (p cubed) but the feedback from a senior colleague was that, &#8220;there are rules that have to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,6,3,5],"tags":[288,265,246,248],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-p-cubed","category-p1","category-p2","category-p3","tag-audience-needs","tag-p-cubed","tag-p2","tag-p3"],"blocksy_meta":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>It&#039;s just not scientific... - p cubed presentations<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ffolliet.com\/staging\/its-just-not-scientific\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"It&#039;s just not scientific... - p cubed presentations\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Recently I shared ideas with a colleague about presentations and she significantly altered the supportive media (p2) of her upcoming presentation. 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