Closed dbooth-boston closed 1 year ago
I think you may be missing a key part of that statement - "assuming without asking that _particularpeople or groups need concepts defined" is poor practice, because you are identifying a particular group as uninformed. Defining your terms, jargon, context, etc. ALWAYS is not offensive; it's just being cautious. Only defining your terms when speaking in one audience but not another might be offensive, though.
I certainly agree with the intent, but I don't think the current prose clearly enough meets that intent, and I think it contains some harmful implicit advice. I think the prose should be clarified in four specific ways:
Since this is not a document on how to do effective technical presentations, I think the guidance can be simplified down to something along the lines suggested at the beginning of this thread, though others might come up with better wording.
This issue is subsumed by https://github.com/w3c/PWETF/issues/232 .
Closing this issue, because it is subsumed by #232 .
Version reviewed: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/cepc/cepc-20200716/
In section 3.2 (Unacceptable behavior), this bit of guidance I believe is overstated to the point of being harmful:
Based on my own experience of 30+ years of presentations in Computer Science, I would say that that guidance is exactly wrong. If you are not CERTAIN that your audience already knows your jargon and the context of your presentation, you should ALWAYS define your terms and clearly set the context. Failing to do so unnecessarily obscures your message and creates an environment in which an "in crowd" knows your jargon and context, and all others are excluded. That is the OPPOSITE of what we should be trying to do.
Certainly if the WHOLE audience already knows your jargon and the context of your topic, then it would be pointless to waste their time by reviewing it. But in over 30 years, I have VERY rarely seen that happen. On the other hand, the opposite happens FREQUENTLY: a speaker does not define terms, and many in the audience are lost but afraid to speak up. That is harmful and counterproductive.
Furthermore, in my experience it does not work well to ask the audience if they are already familiar with your jargon. Usually they either assume that they are -- even if they're wrong -- or they are afraid to sound ignorant by admitting that they aren't. Either way, it works MUCH better to simply be inclusive from the start, by defining your terms and setting the context.
The golden guidance I learned from one of my esteemed professors years ago was to assume that the audience is "intelligent but uninformed". I think he nailed it.
I suggest changing the above-reference paragraph to something along these lines: