The qualities of a good talk

Rabea Gransberger: It means that the speaker is very knowledgeable and that he or she has a well-prepared talk, and they don't skip some of the answers that I would actually expect to have given to me.

A great talk should also match the abstract. Plenty of speakers give talks that don't match their abstract at all because they don't read it again. They submit something for a conference, half a year before the conference, and when they prepare the talk, they have a different idea for the talk in their mind because it developed over that half year.

If a talk doesn't match the abstract anymore, then it's not good for the audience. The audience is at the talk because they expect something that they read in the abstract. Sometimes, some of the points that were raised in the abstract are not addressed in the talk.

What I had to work on, after giving my first talk, was that I was very nervous at the beginning. When I'm very nervous, I tend...