Thursday 21 May 2009

Sparkie's Ten Commandments #6

Thou shalt not bore thine audience with irrelevant fluff - thou shalt concentrate on the real NEED TO KNOW data.

This commandment is easily demonstrated using an example - let's use Swine Flu as the topic of your presentation.

Think about what your audience really needs to know about this potential pandemic.
If your audience is the general public, then what they really NEED TO KNOW must be about the symptoms, treatment and what to do if you think you have it.

If that is the NEED TO KNOW information, how do the recent news reports stack up:
* Information on the genetic make-up of swine flu
* That swine flu is a variation of the H1N1 virus
* How the disease spread from pigs into the human population and why
* What the difference is between an epidemic and a pandemic

Lots of this is fluff. It's not offensive, but it's not NEED TO KNOW either.
It confuses the issue and overloads us with facts that are not going to save us.

For everything you are thinking of saying in a presentation put it through the NEED TO KNOW filter.

It doesn't matter how interesting the story is, or how funny your statistics are, or how much research it took some lab rat to discover the origins of the theory. If your audience, in this situation do not NEED TO KNOW, then leave it out. Please.

No comments: