Most economics seminar presentations are terrible. Basically, we suck at presenting our work.  

There are many guides to improving presentations that you can find online. There’s a recent set of suggestions by Jesse Shapiro on Greg Mankiw’s blog. These guides provide reasonable, uncontroversial advice and for the most part I agree with their suggestions (big font, lead with a question, have a bottom line, etc). Here I’m going to make some suggestions that I don’t often hear others making and which some of you might find controversial.

These are suggestions for presentations. I’ll have a post directed at advice for seminar participants soon.

Before I get going let me acknowledge that I am not the best presenter in the world myself. However, I have completed step 1 on the path to recovery – I have recognized that I have a problem. In fact I have completed step 2…