The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
On Tuesday night (yes, I'm just getting around to typing about it now - so what? :-) ), Mark and I went to a lecture at the Smithsonian. The topic was Medieval Cathedrals of France, and the lecturer was a new-to-us art historian. The Smithsonian has played with their lecture formats over the years - more and more often, they have day-long seminars (too much of a time commitment, generally, unless we *know* they'll be spectacular), or two-hour evening sessions (which this was) instead of the old one-hour format, which both Mark and I prefer.
In any case - the lecture had some amazing nuggets in it. The lecturer compared the doorways of the cathedrals to Roman victory arches, using photographs to make her case very effectively. She ended by stating that the successor architecture in the "modern" world was the Brooklyn Bridge - again, with a lovely slide to illustrate the Gothic arches on that structure. She had amazing slides of cathedral interiors, illustrating the soaring heights reached in relatively few decades, as medieval architects and engineers figured out what they were doing.
But the presentation of the entire two-hour lecture was horrific. The lecturer could not figure out how to use the lapel mike, and she repeatedly threw her hands into the lectern mike. She fumbled in and out of her slideshow presentation, and she was unable to locate the second half of her presentation - on her own computer - for an excruciating five minutes or so. She read her lecture, which was written for some scholarly publication, and there was not a single fifty-cent word that she used when a five-dollar one could be put into place. She tortured the language with -ize and -ate nouns (verbing her nouns), and she mis-pronounced many words.
We seriously considered leaving at the break, but we didn't - because a lot of her *content* was good. But if you're ever called upon to speak, make sure that you know how to use your tools. And target your specific audience, both with language and with presentation style.
Where have you suffered disconnects in content and presentation? And did you tough it out? Or cash in your chips?
Mindy, pleased to have learned something, but frustrated, all the same
In any case - the lecture had some amazing nuggets in it. The lecturer compared the doorways of the cathedrals to Roman victory arches, using photographs to make her case very effectively. She ended by stating that the successor architecture in the "modern" world was the Brooklyn Bridge - again, with a lovely slide to illustrate the Gothic arches on that structure. She had amazing slides of cathedral interiors, illustrating the soaring heights reached in relatively few decades, as medieval architects and engineers figured out what they were doing.
But the presentation of the entire two-hour lecture was horrific. The lecturer could not figure out how to use the lapel mike, and she repeatedly threw her hands into the lectern mike. She fumbled in and out of her slideshow presentation, and she was unable to locate the second half of her presentation - on her own computer - for an excruciating five minutes or so. She read her lecture, which was written for some scholarly publication, and there was not a single fifty-cent word that she used when a five-dollar one could be put into place. She tortured the language with -ize and -ate nouns (verbing her nouns), and she mis-pronounced many words.
We seriously considered leaving at the break, but we didn't - because a lot of her *content* was good. But if you're ever called upon to speak, make sure that you know how to use your tools. And target your specific audience, both with language and with presentation style.
Where have you suffered disconnects in content and presentation? And did you tough it out? Or cash in your chips?
Mindy, pleased to have learned something, but frustrated, all the same
(Anonymous)
Camera Obscura