Should a research presentation make use of suspense to engage the audience?

Question

Suspense is a powerful tool. In story-telling, not knowing what is going to happen or how the story is going to end can grab attention and sustain interest. In giving a research presentation, one is often encouraged to "tell a story". One could certainly make use of suspense to do so.

We are interested in how best to predict X. Previous research has indicated that P Q and R could be crucial here. [much later] It turned out that... [pause for drama]... variable K was surprisingly the strongest predictor of X!

However, most presentations take a more up-front approach.

Welcome to my presentation entitled "How K can be used to predict X"...

The latter approach follows the advice that I have often received, which can be summarised by the maxim:

Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you have told them.

So, is it a bad idea to use suspense with the intention of making the "story" of your presentation more engaging?

[This question was inspired by an answer given elsewhere on Academia.SE.]

Answer 1

I believe that using suspense in a talk is a terrible idea on any but the shortest rhetorical time scales.

The reason is that, at any given time, a significant fraction of your audience will not be paying attention. It doesn't matter whether they're twiddling with their phone or just thinking about what you said two slides ago: the point is, it's terribly easy for people to miss bits of a talk. As a result, if you build your talk as a suspenseful mystery where somebody has to be paying attention at the right times, then you'll probably fail to convey key information to a significant fraction of your audience.

Now, there's nothing wrong with using it in the short range as a bit of rhetorical flourish, e.g., "And what did we find? The wires were covered with purple spots!" Once you start putting long-range dependencies in your talk, however, you're gambling with attention. Likewise, even without putting in a dependency, if you say your key idea only once in your talk, you're decreasing the number of people who will hear and remember it, compared to if you say it in "preview" and again when you get to it in detail.

In short: don't hide information from your audience. There's plenty of other, more effective ways to make a scientific presentation interesting.

Answer 2

Have you ever read a badly written book or short story, where the author had a fine idea, but just didn't manage to pull it off?

You'll just have to try this out and see if you can pull it off.

Note, when I say "try it out", I mean on your friends. Practice talks.

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I predict that this will be a growing trend. Cooking magazines and DIY magazines now often use a story-telling format. Instead of just plunking down on the page the recipe for roasting a chicken that was found to give the best results in the testing labs, nowadays the author tells a story -- and it's a personal story, told in the first person. It's a journey of discovery... to arrive at the best recipe for roasting chicken! It sounds funny, but actually you do get drawn in.

Also, consider the new field of creative nonfiction. Wikipedia defines it: "Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives."

You can laugh at this too, and see it as part of the general shift toward egocentrism, where the researcher-author has to be at the center of everything. The author can't just expound about the material, making it interesting and understandable. Nooo, he has to make everything about himself!

But if you've read any good creative nonfiction, you'll see that when the author can pull it off, it's wonderful.

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Jake was concerned about a distracted member of the audience missing a key bit and therefore being confused for the whole rest of the talk. That can easily happen in a traditional talk structure as well.

Hopefully, if you are a researcher who is interested in experimenting with more novel structures, you are also someone who knows how to use, or can learn how to use, techniques performers in the fine arts have learned, of getting the audience's attention before the critical point that must not be missed. For example, a small joke to wake everybody up. Sometimes reducing your volume at a certain place can have a mesmerizing effect. Etc.

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Personally I think the key to not overdoing the novel stuff is to make sure that it doesn't detract from the science. The takeaway message needs to be "the science that was presented is fascinating", not "the scientist put on a great performance". In other words, the science needs to take center stage, as opposed to you taking center stage.