Presentation Tips

I've presented technical talks at a few conferences. I wasn't bad, but I wasn't all that great either.

In the last couple of years, I've been working my way towards a Competent Toastmaster (CTM) Award at Toastmasters. Some of my CTM speeches can be found on my old blog.

I serendipitously found a collection of links on presentation tips. They're all good and worth looking at.

Perhaps the most interesting set of tips, Mark-Jason Dominus's Conference Presentation Judo, is not linked directly on Graymad's blog. Instead, I found a link to it in Eric Gunnerson's Creating a great presentation.

MJD's talk is specifically on how to give a three-hour tutorial at a conference, but much of it is more generally applicable. Be sure to read the Detailed Notes in parallel with the slides.

He argues that delivery is more important than content:

A talk with good presentation and poor content beats one with good content and poor presentation. This is because the first talk will at least pass the time amusingly; the second will be a deadly bore and you won't learn anything anyway.

Of course, the trick is to have good presentation and good content.

He asserts that a long introduction is a waste of time, that no-one can remain attentive for a three-hour class, and that you should frontload the class, putting the most important material in the first 45 minutes.

One of his most startling claims is that the old advice

Tell them what you're going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you told them.

is bullshit, boring, and a waste of time. Instead, he says

Get to the point as quickly as possible.

Stay there.

Don't repeat; embellish.

He explains the last point:

The third piece of advice ("Don't repeat; embellish") requires a little elaboration. You want to present each important idea more than once, because a lot of the audience won't really get it after the first example. So you show a second, different example, which has an interesting variation. The people who didn't fully grasp the concept the first time around now have an opportunity to see it again. The people who did get it the first time around will remain alert and interested because of the variation.

Both the traditional tell-tell-tell and the repeat-embellish methods use reinforcement to drive a message home, but the repeat-embellish technique sounds like a more valuable and interesting way of doing it.