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# Judging by Content, Delivery, and Bravery
- URL: https://www.workroom-productions.com/judging-by-content-delivery-and-bravery/
- Published: 2025-02-19T15:59:55.000Z
- Updated: 2025-02-19T15:59:55.000Z
- Description: How I Judge Talks
- Author: James Lyndsay
- Tags: Articles, SpeakerPrep

I'll look at your 300-word abstract, or the one-liner the conference has given you, or your slide deck, or your video, or your performance, and I'll make an irrational judgement\*.

Trying to rationalise my judgement, I *think* that I favour the following:

- **Content**: if there's something specific that I want to use
- **Delivery**: if I'm having fun
- **Bravery**: if you're pushing yourself somehow

I'll favour something with more of these qualities over talks with fewer, and my mood at the time dictates whether I favour one over another.

There are also turn-offs. I don't, at all, favour teases (especially if I'm being *asked* to judge) and assume that if you won't tell me your meaningful content, you don't have much. If even your summary stinks of LLM-generation (or, in earlier days, is littered with letter errors), I'll imagine that you're not going to pay much attention to your delivery, either. And while I admire chutzpah, I abhor bullshit manifesting as bravery. Boo to you.

An experience report pretty-much always has usable content somewhere, and can be packed with bravery if candid. An interactive workshop lets me play, a performer makes me delighted, and a proper story catches me like a big old rusty hook. I'll give my attention to a brave new speaker even if all they have are old truths, but an old hand had better have really good stuff or at very least be weird.

---

\`\* *Judgement* is a feeling. And it's also a measured dissection of the situation, its context, and the regulations that apply to arrive at a binding decision. These two things are different: That's how language works. I recognise that I *feel* attracted or repelled by a talk, I don't think that I should trust the feeling without some thought, so I try to take it apart to see how it works.