Recently I was debating with some people on the quality of abstracts that were submitted to various conferences and events. There was quite a bit of discussion on the way that the summary of a presentation ought to be worded, whether your name should be in the description and various other considerations of what will attract an audience.

To a large extent we all have our own personalities, and some of them show through in the session abstracts they write. If you look at how Brent Ozar (blog | @brento) or Buck Woody (blog | @BuckWoody) talk about their sessions, it's quite different from those of many people. How many speakers use Nissan GT-R or arsenal in their descriptions?

As a speaker I have a different view of the events and sessions, and more often than not I look at the speaker before the session title or description. Those often mean more to me in deciding if I want to attend. However I'm not sure that my view is the same as most of the audience.

So…

I've decided to try and help everyone out. We have created a new forum at SQLServerCentral calledPresentations and Speaking. It's there for speakers to post their abstracts or titles and get feedback from everyone out there. This is one forum that I hope people subscribe to and go look at the entries on a regular basis.

I'd also ask that those of you that have attended a conference or a SQL Saturday, take a minute and look at a few of the past submissions. Post a note in the comments for this editorial and let us know which abstracts made you want to attend a session and why? Or which ones made you not want to go see the session.

With some feedback and help, you can help all the speakers out there get better at building presentations, and hopefully teaching you more about SQL Server.

Steve Jones

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