Should I assume that attendees have read my papers when I give a talk?

Question

On occasion during talks, presenters will say, "as you know from reading my papers" or during a Q&A someone will say "you should know from my papers".The above clearly seems inappropriate for most settings outside of a group meeting. However, to what extent should I expect my audience to know what I am talking about vs. completely assuming that my audience know nothing?

Answer 1

To answer the question in the title, your instincts are correct (at least in my experience): it's good not to assume unless your audience is a highly specialized group (for example, when I was in grad school, my PI would talk about specific lab member's papers because it was safe to assume we had read them). Otherwise, it can come off as lazy at best or flippant at worst. A talk should always contain the information needed to understand what you're trying say. Leaving gaps in information is a good way to seed questions that you want to answer, but it's not so great for engaging a group of people to think with you.

But to get at the heart of your other question (that of "anticipated audience knowledge"), I find how you present something is more important than what you present.

Case in point, I once brought my class of advanced biomedical engineering high school students to a professional lab for a tour. The tour started with four or five graduate students who had been asked to prepare a standard talk-about-your-research presentation. Most were not spectacular. One of my students came up to me afterwards and asked, "Did they really think we didn't know what stem cells were?"

Having watched the presentations with them, and this one in particular, it wasn't so much that they offended my students by including a background slide on stem cells but because they presented information purely for the sake of information. Put another way, the slide in question was tangential to the story they were telling about their research; its inclusion was justified by the phrase, "in case you don't know about such-and-such, here it is."

When I've coached speakers, I'll often tell them that no one hates to hear something that they know. If anything, it forms a connection between speaker and audience by establishing that they have common knowledge. Put metaphorically, it gives the audience something to cling on to in otherwise unfamiliar territory.

Nevertheless, that information has to be relevant to your talk. To go back to the previous example, I believe the speaker was talking about using fluorescence microscopy to study stem cells. Instead of just outright throwing the basics at their audience, they could have motivated it better. "We are using [this technology] to study stem cells, but why is it important to study them in the first place? [change slide to what they had] As you might know, it's because there are many types of stem cells, [and then they could narrow down to the class they were studying.]"

That type of presentation uses context to mask the fact that you're sharing basic information. It accomplishes the same thing as an information dump, but it does it in a way to put speaker and audience on the same level.

That's my opinion on this matter. Mileage may vary, of course. Even still, thank you for indulging a long answer.