Spoken vs Written Speech

I think I”ve written this book before but I felt like writing it again, as I recently joined a webinar which was about Railway and Systems Engineering. The presentation was full of interesting points and the slides were well made. There were diagrams drawn or excerpts from papers that explain complex concepts in simple summaries, for topics that I am very familiar with and have great interest in them. But, here is the but, but the presenter read from a text.

The presenter was clearly seen reading from a text and rarely look up from the podium. Either the presenter was reading from text in the presenter’s note or a printout of the text, or even iPad, it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that the presenter was reading and not presenting to the audience. This was the first problem.

Secondly the presenters speech sounded like it was taken from a paper, where the sentence structure was not really clear and unlike how spoken speech would be. There was a lot of adjunction at the start of a sentence which made it very hard to understand while listening because you can’t go back to the start of the sentence. While deciphering the speech and making sense of the meanings, your mind would have a hard time. See what I did there? Made me sound like Yoda.

To add to that, there were a lot of uncommon phrases, that if you were reading it, would very likely cause a double take (an example was the term “progressive assurance “ which made me think whether it was assurance done progressively or was the assurance process done on the progress?). While I was wondering that, the presenters speech sounded ploughed on with other facts and studies, which over 30 minutes into the webinar, totally overwhelmed me. I understand the presentation tries to cover a lot as a system engineering webinar always is, but I think this was a mistake and the presenter should focus on certain points and expand on them more.

Although I was excited to join the webinar, after half an hour, I sadly left the webinar because I don’t feel like I was getting the benefit over the time spent. I am sure the presenter didn’t wish. It to be like that but it happened. Something that I wish I wouldn’t do, and one of the reasons I wrote this post.

Thank you for reading.