Reader style: academic audience
How the presentation principles change for peers or a jury. It has three parts: who the reader is, the overrides, and what is open.
Who
- Reader: peers at a conference or seminar, or a jury at the defence of a thesis or an internship report. They come to judge the work.
- Expertise: expert in the topic or near it. Prior knowledge is higher than in the lab lessons the principles rest on.
- Medium: a room, a fixed slot, then questions from peers or from the jury.
- Reading mode: listening once, front to back, with no replay.
Overrides
Few rules change. Everything else in the principles holds.
| Principle | Change | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A talk is not a paper | strengthen: the slot sets the length, so cut material to fit it and do not speed up. Fewer slides, not faster ones | the differences between a short fixed format and a traditional talk mostly reflected choosing less material (Liao 2020); slide counts per minute are conventions (Beamer 2026, Kawasaki 2005). Convention, untested |
| A talk is not a paper | keep: a conference talk opens differently from the paper, even to peers who know the paper | 44 talks in geology, medicine and physics (Rowley-Jolivet 2005). Supported with caveat (descriptive) |
| Plan the questions | strengthen: expect questions from peers or a jury on method and limits; prepare backup slides for them and say where the evidence is weak | Q&A research is descriptive (Xu 2022, secondary); Blome 2017 gathers expert advice, experiments are scarce. Convention |
| No script on screen | relax: the edge of on-screen key terms over the voice alone is shown for low prior knowledge, so an expert room may need fewer words, not more | Adesope 2012. Inference: whether the effect holds for expert audiences is not known |
Thresholds
None changed.
Open questions
- Whether the sentence-headline result holds for expert audiences, hour-long talks and live speakers: not known (position, Not known).
- Whether a defence differs from a conference talk: the genre research (Rowley-Jolivet 2005) covers conference talks only.
- What a Q&A should do for the listener's memory: the research is descriptive.