The problem of presentation

When I was at Ofcom, I remember telling one of the junior members of our team (who is paranoid about identity thievery, so I won't mention his name), that his work was fine, but ugly, so could he change it so that it was easier to read. He was appalled - as if such a trivial matter could be so important.

I was reminded of this over the weekend, when I went to a workshop on prosopography (if you need to look it up, here). It was an excellent day, with some really good thoughts for me to take away, but I was struck by the variability of the presentations. Everyone in the room was clever, everyone was probably pretty eloquent (given most had written long, well-structured PhDs), yet most presentations were either mediocre, or good extemporisations. In fact, most of the best academic presentations (be they lectures or papers) have been of this type. The best was by a chap called Richard Price, who opening his talk with, 'I reread my paper on the train this morning and decided it was too boring to read out' and then proceeded to give an accurate and witty account of the Council of Chalcedon without notes - glorious.

But this was a workshop to compare methods and such extemporisations don't work quite so well. What does work well are slides. And almost everyone used them, mostly badly. There was one exception, Stephen Baxter gave well run though and clear summary of the work he'd been doing on Anglo - Saxons. I looked him up: he used to be a management consultant.

I do slides a lot; I was rubbish at them to begin with - it's a different skill to essays and papers, but it's not that hard: they need to be short, clear and allow you to talk to them, not read them out. I doubt historians are taught how to do this (I wasn't), but - on the evidence of this - God they need to be. A shame too, because it made it harder to understand what were fascinating issues and less appreciative of what was excellent work.