Editorial: Blue on blue doesn't work.

However brilliant a scientist is, however incisive their mind and however elegant their experiments, they must be able to communicate effectively. The ability to write fluently, to inspire an audience in a lecture hall, and to listen carefully and argue cogently face-to-face with a sceptic are all important. Maybe some people believe that it’s only important to impress the journal referees and members of grant panels who might be in the audience. Well, it is possible that journal refereesmay remember if the person they’re sitting next to is convulsedwith apathy during your talk, and they may remember this long after they’ve forgotten anything you actually said. I suspect that we all feel that sometimes, maybe often, we fall short of the standards we set for ourselves in our talks. I’m sure I can’t be alone in knowing that sinking feeling, when there was something you wanted to say but realize that the message got lost somewhere in the saying of it. and sometimes we recognize exactly what the faults were in our own talks only when we see those faults displayed by others. So I have been compiling a small list of ‘dos and don’ts’ for scientific presentations. Many of these relate to Powerpoint presentations, perhaps because this is still something of a strange new toy to me; I feel rather nostalgic about the absence of the blue slides whose age you could estimate by how much they’d faded, and the slide with the cracked glass, and the one that was always upside down whichever way you put it in the projector – anyway, here is a sample.