How to Give a Good Lecture

I attend a lot of lectures. Unfortunately, I attend very few that are good. Chiefly, I think, that is because most lecturers don't pay attention to the vital point of a lecture. Most people view lectures as a learned expert (i.e. themselves) bestowing information upon their audience. The problem here is that it becomes all about the lecturer. If you are a demagogue, that's what you want. But if you want to teach, it is a terrible attitude.

To begin with, if you are lecturing, you are already failing at optimal teaching strategies. Numerous studies have indicated that lecturing is probably the worst way to impart information. The ability of people to tune into a lecture is limited. Generally, they will only remember the beginning and the end of the lecture. Everything in between is a waste of time. So if you are talking for 50 minutes, 30 minutes of that lecture was not heard. As a result, if you are forced to lecture, you have to break up the lecture into small chunks of really no more than 15 minutes. Ask questions, have them stand up and dance, whatever, but break it up!

But if you are required to give a lecture, you still need to remember what the whole point of the lecture is and it is not to show people you can talk for an hour about the subject. Any fool can do that. A good lecture is centered on the needs of the audience and requires three things: understandability, relevance, and digestibility. Without all three, the lecture, and by extension the lecturer, is a failure.

First, the lecture must be understandable. If the audience can't understand what you are saying, you are wasting their time. This may require learning to speak clearly for some. For others, it may require learning to speak loudly enough to be heard. For most, it requires talking at the level of the audience. The more the audience has to think to interpret what you say, the less they can think about what you are trying to convey. This means using words they can understand or defining terms they might not know, providing enough background material to make your points clear, making sure your visuals mean something and are legible. I have attended far too many talks with slides showing dense, unreadable tables or pictures that related in some way to what the person was talking about, but were not labeled well enough to understand how. The slides need to be clear enough that people can understand them quickly, or you spend the time to walk them through it. The lecture also needs to have a story, it needs to follow a plan. Lecturers often know what they want to say and throw together some slides that might relate, then make it up as they go along, so the lecture is rambling and repetitive. Take the time to organize it.

Second, the lecture must be relevant. I could give the world's best lecture on fairies and unicorns, but if I am supposed to be teaching anatomy to med students, the lecture is a failure. Make sure everything you say has a point to the topic at hand. If it does not, throw it out. You can tell stories to make things interesting, but make sure the stories are illustrative of the points in the talk. Don't go off about what you think of someone's political views or the last football game. Nobody paid to hear that crap. Save that sort of talk for the bar after class. If the talk does not address the needs of the audience, even if those needs are as simple as being entertained for a while, the talk fails.

Third, the talk must be digestible. By this I mean how well is the information retained. The talk may be relevant and understandable, but if it makes so little impact that no one remembers it ten minutes later, there was no point. This is not remembering the lecture though. It is about remembering the ideas of the lecture. A good lecture is like a good story. The style of writing is transparent to the material. Many people get this confused. A lot of people will say William Faulkner and James Joyce are great writers. That they may be, but they are terrible story tellers. Most people who read their material emote over how well the stories were written. Ask them what the story was about though, and they will say, "I have no idea, but wasn't it written beautifully?"

Speakers often do the same thing as highly stylized writers, they turn the talk into an advertisement for themselves. This is demagoguery, not lecturing. Hitler was a classic example of this. Listening to his speeches caused a huge groundswell of emotion. But if one read the talk without the style and personality of the man, the speeches made no sense. Hitler knew this. That was his intent. He said so in his memoirs. Demagogues use this to manipulate people and this makes them dangerous. Most politicians are demagogues. Their talks are not designed to convey information, they are designed to manipulate people emotionally. A good lecturer does not try to bury the content behind a good talk, the talk should enforce the content over the lecturer.

In sum, make sure that the lecture is aimed at the point of the lecture. Lectures should be about bringing information to your audience, not manipulating them. Any manipulation should be centered around conveying the information in as clear and concise a manner as possible in the most memorable fashion. Above all, the lecture should be honest. Your intent and the information contained within it should be clearly stated.

So stop preaching, talking at the audience, rambling off on pointless and irrelevant topics and lecture like you mean it.