// the find
jtleek/talkguide
The Leek Group Guide to Giving Talks
A markdown-only guide on how to give academic talks, written by Jeff Leek for his stats/computational biology lab group. It's advice content, not software — covers talk structure, slide style, handling Q&A, and job talks, aimed at grad students and postdocs in academic science.
- The advice is concrete and specific rather than generic — e.g. exact rules for presenting equations (words over symbols, max two subscripts) and a script for how to narrate a figure out loud
- Honest about the uncomfortable parts of academia, like admitting a talk's real purpose is often advertising, not science, and that being well-known matters more than being right
- Short, skimmable, no filler — you can read the whole thing in 10 minutes and walk away with actionable rules
- Part of a deliberate series (data sharing, reviewing papers, writing R packages) so it's clearly a maintained personal methodology, not a one-off blog post
- Dead project: last commit was December 2016, no code, no CI, nothing to maintain — this is a markdown file, not a repo you 'use'
- Entirely academic-talk-flavored advice (job talks, group meetings, conference short talks) — doesn't transfer well to industry conference talks, internal eng talks, or product demos
- No examples embedded in the repo itself; it just links out to external slide decks (some links from 2016 are likely dead now) instead of showing annotated slides
- Zero structure beyond one long README — no checklist, no template deck, nothing you can actually copy and fill in; it's all prose advice you have to extract yourself