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.