In my (admittedly much shorter) career, I've found that there are essentially 2 axioms to giving good academic talks, and everything else can be derived from th

In my (admittedly much shorter) career, I've found that there are essentially 2 axioms to giving good academic talks, and everything else can be derived from them: 1. Your talk is an advertisement for your work, not the work itself. Your only goal is to convince people to read your paper. Once you realize that this is what you're doing, you can derive several more specific rules like "not too much math", "skip the details", "visual slides are better", "make sure there's enough motivation for them to care", "make sure non-experts can follow along", etc. As an advertiser, you are fighting for people's attention, not their full acceptance (yet). 2. Most people respond best to (and remember) stories, so make your talk into a linear story. From this, you get rules like "every slide should follow logically from the previous", "there should be a strong motivation for why you're doing something", "omit boring stuff", "punchlines and surprise can really help if used well", "building suspense is also useful for some talks", etc. Note that the traditional "here are 3 ways our method is better than previous methods" is definitely not a story.