Oh lordy! Someone should ban the use of flow-charts in our informal group talks. No, scratch that – they should simply be banned everywhere, all the time. Just to make sure, I’d add a module in Microsoft Powerpoint that auto-detects images with boxes and and arrows, and deletes those images automatically. At least that way, we would enjoy watching the author’s confusion and subsequent melt-down instead of suffering through the agony of listening to a explanation of why this box leads to this other box and how this arrow goes back to the original box.

There is nothing more fundamental to the rhetoric of professional science than the informal seminar. But giving good seminar is an art that not all scientists will ever master. I know a priori that 90% of all seminars will be shite. Like death and taxes, this is but a normal part of life. But still, there are ways to handicap yourself, and one of the worst is to use a flow-chart in your power-point presentation.

We had recently, in my lab, one of the most boring seminars in living memory. Although most of the slides in the presentation were pretty, this all came to naught as the speaker pounded away with a detail-obsessed relentless drone, like a therapy session on crack.

In this particular afternoon seminar, I fell asleep at the flow-chart slide. Now, falling asleep is not such a bad thing. Afternoons are not the best times to have seminars. As the post-lunch digestion snakes its way down the digestive tract, one tends to fall asleep. It’s O.K. to fall asleep for a little 10 minute cat-nap. That’s normal. That’s human. Most of the time, you can pick up where you left off, and follow the seminar.

The problem was that at this particular flow-chart slide. I woke up to the very same slide. In the ten minutes that I fell asleep, we had only proceeded to the third box of the flow-chart.

Why is a flow-chart bad?

A good talk is basically a good story. And like any good story, there’s a protagonist, a hero. It could be Harry Potter, or it could be your electron-microscopy image. It really doesn’t matter. You explain what your hero wants to do. Then something happens, then something else happens.

This structure is easy to follow. It may even be universal. The slides in a good presentation echos that.

But when you illustrate your story in a flow-chart, you give the story away. You stop the story from happening by giving an overview that something happens, then something happens. Hey, we already knew that. Worse, you talk about the story, instead of telling a story. It’s awful, it’s boring. Don’t do it.

Just delete the flow-chart and tell the story.