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Verbosity Killed the Poster

Zen Faulkes at Better Posters contemplates whether a novice presenter should give an talk or present a poster. He gives many reasons why first-timers should consider a poster. "Posters are less formal, less high stakes, and almost never get bumped," Faulkes writes, but he adds that many researchers fall victim to verbosity. Oftentimes, he writes, this is because the poster is generally the first presentation of a group’s research, at the stage in which "we were still thinking through the story." As a result, these posters often contain "too much text. Way too much text," he writes. Faulkes blogs that a quality poster should not resemble the first draft of a manuscript – instead, one should write out all of their ideas on paper and then "be especially ruthless in editing it."