Repeating questions
Tags: presentation skills, repeating questionsPosted in Speaking in public
In the presentation guide, repeating questions in order to involve the whole audience is said to be a golden rule for which there is no exception. I have no doubt in the importance of repeating questions, but speakers must be careful not to distress themselves and the audience.
In our department, consisting of 6 groups, we have a weekly colloquium. Once or twice a year, each member gets a chance to present a 45-minute talk for the whole department. During the talk the speaker gets as much comments on her presentation skills as she gets scientific questions. As a result, the presentation-skills of the members of our department improve much faster than the other institute-members who do not practice as much.
One of the major training items is of-course repeating the questions. A speaker can be interrupted more than 20 times during his 45 minutes if she intermittently forgets to repeat the questions. After the third or forth warning, sometimes a large banner will be raised by the chairman or another group leader. But, usually the comment is verbal:







Readers' comments
Well, you'd hope that the chair(wo)man does the job when someone is about to go over time. If you don't ...
11 Mar 2010 20:56, Mirjam
(I'm typing this comment for the third time now... *sigh*) Many people don't know this, but Google Docs has a built-in ...
9 Mar 2010 23:47, cpbotha
For senior scientists it may be a conscious (although stupid) choice to give a talk to impress people, instead of ...
9 Mar 2010 10:35, Mirjam
What do you mean by 'pointing stick'? Obviously, we don't live in an ideal world, but fortunately most scientists will ...
22 Jan 2010 8:28, Mirjam
What about academia.edu? My impression was that they aspire to become a kind of "Facebook for scientists".
14 Jan 2010 22:32, Researcher