How to Give a Good Talk

Summary

In computer science, conferences are a focal point of academic attention. Conferences are a moment where computing communities—distributed over the globe—come together. Giving a talk at a conference is an incredible opportunity: for a moment, you have the community’s attention. If you can give a good talk, the community will pay more attention to your work! But what makes a good talk? I spoke at PLMW 2025 on this topic—“How to give a good talk”. You can read an edited transcript of the talk on my blog; you can watch the unedited livestream on YouTube. This blogpost is another cut at the same ideas. The value framework There are many talks at conferences, and there is much to do at a conference apart from sitting in lecture halls (the “hallway” track; meeting with collaborators and colleagues; recharging in your hotel room; exploring a new city). You are competing for attention. As Pras Michel put it in Fugee’s song “How Many Mics”: too many MCs, not enough mics exit your show like I exit the turnpike A good talk needs to be worth the audience’s time. A good talk is a valuable talk: it should convince the audience that your work is valuable, i.e., it should make the audience care about your work. Good talks inform, educate, and entertain What makes a talk valuable? In the PL community, a talk should ‘deliver value’ in at least three ways, if you can pardon the contemporary capitalist jargon: Your talk must inform the audience about what you’ve done. Your talk must educate the audience. Your talk must entertain the audience. Inform: what have you done, and why is it valuable? Computer science conference talks condense papers with tens of thousands of words into twenty minutes. ‘Condense’ is too weak a word—your talk abridges your work, leaving out gobs of detail. We must omit this detail not merely because there’s no time for it, but because the audience does not yet care about the details. Every talk must begin with its motivation: what are the stakes of the work? Ho...