PhD students can give Three Minute Thesis speeches

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a specialized brief presentation format for graduate students in Doctor of Philosophy programs called the Three Minute Thesis (3MT). It started in 2008 at the University of Queensland, spread to over 200 universities, and even has a Wikipedia page. The competitor guide allows for just one static PowerPoint slide rather than the twenty in longer Ignite or Pecha Kucha formats. Here in Idaho there are web pages from both Boise State University and the University of Idaho.

 

At the MIT News on April 30, 2024 there is an article by Amanda Cornwall titled Science communication competition brings research into the real world about their version called the MIT Research Slam.

 

Back on January 10, 2020 I blogged about How old are brief (3 to 7 minute) speech formats?

 

The cartoon was assembled from a DIY clock face and number three at Openclipart.

 

Ignite Seattle celebrates the tenth anniversary of its five-minute talks

On November 15th Clare McGrane had an article posted at GeekWire describing how Ignite Seattle marks 10th anniversary, a decade after accidentally launching a global phenomenon. It is unintentionally hilarious for ahistoricism (lack of concern with history). 

The format for a five-minute long Ignite talk involves 20 slides with auto advance after 15 seconds. The similar format for a Pecha Kucha talk (from back in February 2003 in Tokyo) also involves 20 slides but with auto advance after 20 seconds for a 6 minute and 40 second talk. Ignite and Pecha Kucha customarily ignore each other. For an example, see Sandy Rushton’s September 19th blog post at BrightCarbon titled Lessons from PechaKucha Night.

Pecha Kucha and Ignite both are constrained versions of a Lightning Talk (about five minutes, perhaps from 1997). But brief speech formats go back almost a century to the April 1917 first talk by the Four Minute Men, which I blogged about back in August 2010 in a post titled The power of brief speeches: World War I and the Four Minute Men.

It always is okay to break the rules

In her June 30th blog post at Calculated Presentations Janice Tomich asked the rhetorical question Is it ever ok to break the rules? Then she said:

“Today I learned (again) that yes it is okay to challenge the rules.”

and

“Rules are often just gatekeepers that keep out people who won’t try to push the gate open.”

Let’s look at a well-known example. A decade ago Guy Kawasaki proclaimed The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint which is:

“It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.”

Some people have taken that as a general rule, but it really just describes one style for boardroom pitches. It’s not the Ten Commandments. Two other effective presentation styles are Pecha Kucha and Ignite.

Kawasaki’s rule is to show slides at a rate of 0.5 per minute, while Pecha Kucha has three slides per minute and Ignite has four. As shown above in a bar chart, the rate for Ignite is EIGHT TIMES higher than what Kawasaki says.

When you look around, you occasionally will find other blog posts about using different styles (breaking rules) like Daren Fleming’s 2007 Breaking the Rules of Public speaking and Michael Port’s 2014 Break These Rules for Better Public Speaking.

The sledgehammer image came from the Library of Congress.

Speed geeking - a parallel series of brief presentations

What’s the best way to organize a series of brief presentations, aka Lightning Talks? One possibility is a Pecha Kucha or Ignite Night. Both these formats involve a ballroom, as shown above, with 20 PowerPoint slides being shown for a fixed interval of 20 or 15 seconds each. 

Another is Speed geeking. It is like speed dating but adapted to a group. The audience is divided into a series of small groups. Ideally each group listens to a presentation in a small conference room, and then rotates to the next one, as shown above. For a small group flipcharts might be preferable to PowerPoint (perhaps as printed handouts).

I recently saw Speed geeking mentioned under See also when I again looked at the Wikipedia page about Pecha Kucha. There is a better description of Speed geeking in the NHS IQ Learning Handbook. 

A table summarizes the differences between Speed geeking and Pecha Kucha or Ignite. It’s a more flexible way to organize a series of brief presentations that should be considered, particularly for planning educational sessions. 

101-word stories and 50-second elevator speeches

On January 4th Boise Weekly published ten winners and judge’s picks from their 10th annual Fiction 101 contest. Those ten writers each managed to tell a unique story using only 101 words.

Coincidentally, on January 5th, Fred Miller blogged about non-fiction elevator speeches. If you speak at a reasonable rate of 120 words per minute, that 101-word limit corresponds to a 50-second speech. Fred described an extremely useful floor-by-floor approach that can work within 50 seconds, or longer as appropriate.  

Two years ago I blogged about elevator speeches, which I described as covering What do you do that can help me? You can find a much more detailed discussion in Terri L. Sjodin’s 2011 book, Small Message, Big Impact - How to Put the Power of the Elevator Speech Effect to Work for You. An excerpt is here on her blog.

A 50-second elevator speech is at one end of a class of very useful, brief presentation formats - which also include 100-second presentations, 200-second Presto presentations, 300-second Ignite presentations, and 400-second Pecha Kucha presentations.

The 99 (or 100) second presentation

In previous posts I have discussed several recent brief presentation formats with times of 200 seconds (Presto), 300 seconds (Ignite) or 400 seconds (Pecha Kucha).

There also is an even briefer one - the 99-second presentation. I saw it mentioned in a recent blog comment by Scott Berkun, which led me back to his blog post from March 2004. The 99-second presentation was described in a 2003 ASTD presentation by Sivasailam Thiagarajan (Thiagi), who started using them back in 1988! Over in New Zealand Simon Park recently has been using them to select university tutors.

PRESTO: the 200 second presentation with 10 slides, for 20 seconds each

Recently I found out that there was an even briefer slide presentation format than either  Pecha Kucha or Ignite. Pecha Kucha uses 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each (while Ignite uses 15 seconds). PRESTO, which means to PRESent your TOpic, uses just 10 slides (or half the time for Pecha Kucha).

Jeane Trojan also has blogged about this format being called a Mashup, and given six tips for using it. Five Mashup events have been held at the Hub in Prague. I’m not sure which name really came first, PRESTO or Mashup.

The 200-second presentation time (3-1/3 minutes) is curiously close to the typical length of a 45-rpm single record from Top 40 (Contemporary hit) radio.

If you have heard about Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule for venture capital presentations, then you know he suggests using 10 PowerPoint (or Keynote) slides in 20 minutes (or less). The PRESTO format calls for presenting slides at 6 times the rate he suggests.  

Before you construct a PRESTO you also need to know your speaking rate. Suppose that it is 120 words per minute, or 2 words per second. If you spoke without pausing, then you only could expect to say 40 words while each slide was being shown. This means that visuals will be used rather than text.

There also could be an even briefer format with 150 seconds, at 15 seconds per slide (and only about 30 words per slide). That might be called a half-Ignited presentation, but  it deserves a more clever name.

The image of magician Zan Zig is from an 1899 poster.

Four-minute men, three-minute women, and one-upmanship

On August 19 Scott Berkun blogged about The four minute presentation and referred to my August 9 post on this blog.

Back during World War I some women took the idea of brief speeches even further. The November 29, 1917 issue of The Idaho Statesman said that in Boise there were ten days of speeches in theaters by ‘three minute women’ organized via the women’s committee of the Council of National Defense and the Four Minute Men.

An article in Volume 23 of Public Libraries (on page 218) said that:

“In Memphis, there has recently sprung full-fledged into being a live organization of ‘Three Minute Women.’ It is already in touch with the Government, and may prove the beginning of a national organization. It addresses groups of women which the Four Minute Men can not easily reach. At the noon-hour in a bag factory, a Three Minute Speech on thrift stamps was the means of selling $55 worth of them to the women employees, who had ignored the movement until that moment.”

In James A. B. Scherer’s book The Nation at War, on page 62 he noted that in North Carolina:

“They have also quaintly organised the women down there; they have what might be called a company of three-minute women, on the principle, I suppose, that women can say more in three minutes than the Four- Minute Men can in four (and say it much more to the purpose). They have put these three-minute women at the telephones; it is easy enough to get the co- operation of the telephone companies. So every day at noon when the North Carolina farmer puts his ear to the telephone he not only gets the latest market quotations on ‘butter'n'eggs,’ and corn and cotton and hay, but ‘central’ drops into his ear at the same time just a little dose of the proper patriotic ’dope’ that Uncle Sam thinks he needs at the moment.”

Where did I find out about the Four Minute Men? In the forum section of the Winter 2009 issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs magazine Professor Lisa Mastrangelo wrote a 27 page paper titled World War I, Public Intellectuals and the Four Minute Men: Convergent Ideals of Public Speaking and Civic Participation. The Summer 2010 issue carried responses to her essay by four other scholars.

The power of brief speeches: World War I and the Four Minute Men

Imagine you were telling your grandfather about those nifty new, brief presentation formats like Ignite, Pecha Kucha, and Lightning Talks. You enthusiastically described how wonderful it was for speakers to be able to get to the point in only 5 to 7 minutes (possibly with precisely 20 PowerPoint slides).

He then would turn to you, sneer, and ask why it took you guys so darned long! Back during World War I (1917 and 1918) his uncle used to speak about patriotic topics for just four minutes at intermissions in movie theaters. This was before commercial radio broadcasting even existed.

Projectionists took four minutes to change films, so he and the other volunteer speakers to those large captive audiences were simply known as the Four Minute Men. (Of course the name also was meant to recall the Minute Men back during the American Revolution). They used just one or two slides. The entire program cost the government just $102,000.

Those volunteers were an important part of the Committee on Public Information, a federal propaganda agency run by a journalist named George Creel. During the war there were about 75,000 Four Minute Men, who gave an estimated 755,000 speeches to a total audience of 314 million people. The average audience was 416 people. On the average everyone in the US got to hear 3 speeches.

The idea for the Four Minute Men began with a group of Chicago businessmen shortly before the US declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. The very first speech was given by Donald M. Ryerson around April 1st in the 1470 seat Strand Theater, downtown. Mr. Ryerson was a Yale graduate in his early thirties who had worked in his family’s metal supply business, Joseph T. Ryerson and Son.

On April 13th President Wilson issued an executive order establishing a Committee on Public Information. Donald Ryerson went to Washington two days later. In ten minutes he explained the idea to Mr. Creel, who initially put him in charge of making the Four Minute Men into a national organization. Ryerson even trademarked the name of the organization. He left for naval officer training in June, and William McCormick Blair took over. They created a structure with a hierarchy of state and local branches.

By June 18 the Four Minute Men had been recognized on behalf of the Treasury Department, the Food Administration, and the American Red Cross War Council. Even more importantly, early in July the executive council of the motion picture industry recognized them as the only authorized agents speaking for the US government in the motion-picture theaters of the country. The introductory slide their speakers used to establish credibility looked like this:















A series of bulletins and newsletters were printed and mailed out to the organization. Bulletin C contained the following advice:

“...In selecting men for speakers try to secure men with various neighborhood or business contacts, who will be acceptable in appearance and general standing to the audiences, and on whom you can depend with reasonable certainty for forceful and accurate presentation of the subject.

Well-known speakers are too accustomed to longer speeches, with room for anecdotes and the introduction, and should be avoided for this service in favor of young lawyers and business men who will present messages within the four-minute limit rather than originate speeches.”

One issue of The Four Minute Men News contained the following exposition about speech delivery. It was written by by Samuel Hopkins Adams, a journalist whose muckraking articles about patent medicines in Colliers magazine led to the Pure Food Act of 1906. Mr. Adams advice sounds quite contemporary:

“Stick to your time allowance. Five minutes means a guess; four minutes makes a promise.

Begin with a positive, concrete statement. Tell them something at the start.

Use short sentences. The man who can’t make one word do the work of two is no four-minute speaker.

Avoid fine phrases. You aren’t there to give them an ear full but a mind full.

Talk to the back row of your audience; you’ll hit everything closer in.

Talk to the simplest intelligence in your audience; you’’ll hit everything higher up.

Be natural and direct. Sincerity wears no frills.

Give your words time. A jumbled sentence is a wasted sentence. You can’t afford waste on a four-minute allowance.

Don’t fear to be colloquial. Slang that your hearers understand is better than Latin that they don’t.

Don’t figure the importance of your job on a time basis. Four hours of thinking may go into four minutes of speaking.

You represent the United States of America. Don’t forget it. And don’t give your audience occasion to forget it.

Finish strong and sharp. The butterfly is forgotten as soon as he departs, but you recall the hornet because he ends with a point.

Finally, and always - Stick to your pledge and the four minute limit.”

The first subject addressed by the Four Minute Men was “Universal Service by Selective Draft.” Then came the four Liberty Loan campaigns in June 1917, October 1917, April 1918, and October 1918, and the Victory Loan Campaign. Other early speech subjects (before October 1917) included Red Cross, Organization, Food Conservation, Why We Are Fighting, The Nation In Arms, The Importance of Speed, What Our Enemy Really Is, and Unmasking German Propaganda.










Donald Ryerson, the very first “Four Minute Man,” survived the war. In 1928 he became chairman of the business begun by his grandfather, and led it into the Great Depression. Sadly he did not live to a ripe old age. On May 8, 1932, in the aftermath of a nervous breakdown due to overwork, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was only 47. A few years later the Ryerson company was bought by Inland Steel. Ryerson still exists and its successor still sells metals.

There was a 16-page article about the Four-Minute Men in the February 1939 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Speech. Their story also has been told in more detail in a book by Alfred E. Cornebise called WAR AS ADVERTISED: The Four Minute Men and America’s Crusade 1917-1918. Briefer accounts appear on the web here, here, and here.

Lightening Talks?

Scott Berkun discussed The End of Boring Presentations on January 14th in a column at Forbes.com. He described how in 2000 Mark Jason Dominus came up with the idea of five-minute presentations called lightning talks. However, Scott spells the phrase as “lightening talks,” which conjures up striking images like the one shown above where the lightening is supplied by personal airships.

Scott continued by discussing two more modern and more constrained formats with exactly twenty slides advanced at a fixed time interval. Pecha Kucha shows each image for 20 seconds; Ignite shows it for only 15 seconds. He ended by pointing out that the beginning of March will be Global Ignite Week.

The Wikipedia article referred to Dominus coming up with lightning talks in June 2000. When I looked further I also found an article in the March 2000 issue of Training & Development by Jacqueline I. Schmidt and Joseph B. Miller on The Five-Minute Rule for Presentations.

Back in September 2008 I wrote a post about Recent formats for brief presentations: Lightning Talks, Pecha Kucha, and Ignite. I pointed out that formats for brief presentations go back to before 2000 – at least 25 years. Ron Hoff’s 1996 book was called Say It in Six. An article titled Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking about Toastmasters International back in the April 1970 issue of Changing Times magazine mentions that: “….The talks are timed and last five to seven minutes.” Competitive debate also has long used timed speeches.

Another possible meaning for “lightening talk” could be adding cream to lighten coffee. When an audience member forgets to do this during the break between talks, he will find that by the time he walks to the back of the room, pours it in the cup, stirs it, and returns to his seat he will have missed the entire talk!

Recent formats for brief presentations: Lightning Talks, Pecha Kucha, and Ignite

Lightning Talks are brief presentations (typically just 5 minutes) given at a single session of a conference or other forum. They may have started back in 2000 at Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC). Mark Jason Dominus organized a session with a series of 5 minute talks and then showed up with a gong to enforce the time limit. According to the Wikipedia the tradition of short talks at programming conferences actually goes back further, at least to 1997. Lightning Talks are an excellent format for fitting a variety of viewpoints into a meeting.

Generally there are no limits on the visual aids that can be used for Lightning Talks. There may be none, just still images, or even images plus video. Some brave souls even have (gasp) tried live demonstrations of software. There is a YouTube video of an excellent Lightning Talk on “Ubiquitous Offline Shopping” by Wesley Chun from the 2008 Python conference. There also is a longer YouTube video on “Race Driving 101” by Joe Nuxoll which consists of a 4 minute presentation with still images followed by an amazing driver’s eye-view video of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb.

However, there also are two more recent formats which add two further and sillier constraints:
(1) exactly 20 still images
(2) each still image shown for exactly either 20 or 15 seconds.

Pecha Kucha (Japanese for “chit chat”, or the sound of conversation) began in 2003. It was devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham in Tokyo as a night for young designers to show their work in public. They came up with a “patented” formula of 20 images for 20 seconds each, so each presentation was exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds long. Daniel H. Pink wrote approvingly about Pecha Kucha in Wired magazine back in 2007, and then Garr Reynolds also blogged about it.

Ignite is a heresy of Pecha Kucha devised in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. They decided that each image instead should run for only 15 seconds, so each presentation would be exactly 5 minutes long. Both formats unfortunately have been spreading like kudzu or meth labs.

Fixing both the number of images and the time for each image is silly. It is just a kludge: a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem. Usually a kludge just solves one problem by introducing another. In this case it fixes the global problem of getting through an evening program by screwing up the individual presentations. A fixed timing of 15 or 20 seconds per image is a reasonable way of setting up a photo album to run by itself in a digital picture frame. It is a lousy way to force a human being to do a presentation. Personally I don’t see any advantage to being drafted into the PowerPoint Marines Military Marching Band.

Now, there is actually nothing new about the advantage of a brief presentation format. In 1996 Ron Hoff wrote a book called Say It in Six (subtitled How to say exactly what you mean in six minutes or less). Hoff in turn borrowed the brief format from Toastmasters International. Their Competent Communication basic manual teaches how to do public speaking via a series of 10 speeches. Eight of those speeches have time limits of 5 to 7 minutes. Counting an over-run allowance of 30 seconds, their upper limit is 7 minutes and 30 seconds. Now, I’m not sure if that speech limit goes all the way back to the founding of Toastmasters in 1924. I do know that they have not changed it for the past 25 years!