The most important advice I've ever been given is to time myself talking through my slides. It is incredibly difficult to guess how long a particular presentation will take, which makes things rather awkward when you have conference organizers with schedules; talking through your slides gives me an accurate number which can result in me adding or removing slides. Even when I don't change the slides, knowing if I have plenty of time or need to squeeze helps me determine how much to re-iterate points and let things "sink in" before moving on to the next point.
Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
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Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#32I disagree with one point: don't start with writing out the talk. Otherwise the talk will feel unnatural, stilted... Instead, practice speaking your way through it - and write down nice turns of phrase that you come up with while talking. This will resolve most of the flow issues you'd get with starting with writing, most of the awkward sentences, keep the whole thing flowing naturally, and generally result in a bett…
I've found that the weakest part of many presentations is in the transition from one point or idea to the next. Shaky transitions are a prime cause of audience disinterest, and poor flow can quickly remove the auditor from the energy and flow the speaker has established, which makes such a time perfect for checking twitter and FB and otherwise disengaging. The boundaries between ideas should feel natural and smooth,…
One thing I find useful for transitions is to set up some unrelated points in advance.
So instead of doing :
Thing a, thing b, thing c
I do:
We had to do a few things, then tie them together, First thing a, so we also had to do thing b. finally to get going we had to thing c. They all work together like result.
Another transition method that works for me is to just announce the seeming non-sequitor. "Now I need to talk for a minute about X. I know it seems unrelated, but it turns out to be vital..."
HTH someone :)
Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#33Have said this before, will say it again in case it helps. I don't know why this works for me but it manifestly does.
1. Write slides, more than you think you need, and try to have fewer than 1/4 of them include bullets.
2. Print the slides out, one sheet per slide.
3. Tape slides to wall in a grid.
4. Rehearse the talk to the grid of slides on the wall with a sharpie in your hand. Any time you have trouble with a slide or trouble transitioning from one slide to the next, note it (or fix the slide) on the paper slide.
5. Reorganize slides in Keynote (or whatever), print them out again, repeat.
This may just be a bit of a ritual for me, but one thing it definitely does is it creates a context where I don't feel silly rehearsing by myself.
Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#34is the headline missing a comma?
Crap, I'm speaking at this conference?
Or is it really: Crap I'm speaking at this conference? So he's talking crap?
Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#35So I have to admit. I'm still quite torn. On one hand, keeping slides simple and avoiding "eye charts" clearly makes for better readability, and reduces the risk of the presenter "reading from the slide." OTOH, a set of slides like that is utterly useless after the fact, unless it's accompanied by a transcript. Both audio and video recordings require serial attention for 15/30/60 minutes that I typically will not hav…
The best way of handling this in my opinion is to publish an annotated version of the slides afterwards. Here's a good example: https://speakerdeck.com/zachinglis/notes
I would agree for a talk you should optimize for the primary medium, being live presenting. Sure if you want to spread the word you can create other content with the same topic name, like a good blog post, to help you get the message out.
There's noting worse than crappy over texted slides where I attend and am thinking, I could have just stayed home and read the slides.
Apparently there was a classic talk by Dr Nic from Engine Yard who also does stand up comedy, the speaker didn't show up for some reason so Dr Nic jumped up and gave the talk cause he could just read the slides like everyone else. (disclaimer: wasn't there so facts may vary)
Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#36A couple good tips that have helped me:
1) Your public speaking will be more polished and compelling if you think of your speech as a story.
2) If you have some vital points to make, draw a picture on a notecard that will remind you of what you need to communicate. It doesn't matter if your picture is simple or complex, it just needs to get the message across to you. Then if you freeze up, you can look down and relax--no awkward pauses as you squint at several lines of notes.
Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#37(speaking as someone who literally gave buttloads of presentations all over the world for over a decade) if you use slides i suggest reading cliff atkinson's blog "beyond powerpoint bullets". in it he lays out ideas, principles and templates for PPTs (and any other preso tools) that tell stories. these are based on cognitive studies, like the number of bullet points you should use based on how much your audience can…
"tell 'em what you're going to be telling them, tell them, and then tell 'em what you told 'em" This is common advice. http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/ disagrees emphatically with it. Consider well that mjd both gave a lot of presentations, AND managed to consistently get the top speaker rating at a major conference. His contrarian advice may be worth giving a try.
My personal interpretation of the "tell 'em what you're going to be telling them, tell them, and then tell 'em what you told 'em" advice is to never tell people something the same way twice in the same session.
Poor presentations often do something like this: * You should Foo because of X and Y * We did Foo because of X and Y * We've told about Foo. It solves X and Y
More entertaining presentations do something like this: * Our life was full of problems X & Y - and then we found Foo * We started doing Foo, which solved X & Y - with bonus Q * These folk also did Foo - and found bonus Z
Repetition of the topic isn't necessarily bad. Doing it in the same way, or ritually, is.
Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#38This won't apply to most people, but if your talk involves any math at all , use LaTeX + Beamer (www.math.binghamton.edu/erik/beameruserguide.pdf) to prepare pdfs of your slides. They will look much better. The beamer user-guide also has a chapter on presentation preparation. You can export outlines from Emacs org-mode as pdf slides via beamer, which can be (depending on the version, etc) a little fiddly but is much…
Org-mode is a good option for generating slides. You can also write your outline in normal markdown and use Pandoc[1], which is also very good.
[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
While Beamer is fine, you can also generate HTML-based slides with both Org-mode and Pandoc. You can use MathJax for the math. I personally prefer HTML slides, but it really is a matter of preference. (I also find it easier to customize with CSS than LaTeX.) The real beauty is that you can use the same document to generate both, so it's easy to try each option.
More generally, I find using Org-mode or Markdown far easier than any WYSIWYG program. Life is much easier when you separate the content from its presentation.
Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#39So I have to admit. I'm still quite torn. On one hand, keeping slides simple and avoiding "eye charts" clearly makes for better readability, and reduces the risk of the presenter "reading from the slide." OTOH, a set of slides like that is utterly useless after the fact, unless it's accompanied by a transcript. Both audio and video recordings require serial attention for 15/30/60 minutes that I typically will not hav…
TeMPoraL's comment comes close to my response, but it's not quite what I'd say:
A slide deck is a visual aid. Its only purpose is to be a visual aid. If you want your audience to take a physical memento away with them, don't be lazy: make a separate, physical memento designed to be taken away with them. Your slide deck should be useless after the fact, just like a bullet shell casing is useless after you've fired the bullet.
When you make something, make it with a singular purpose in mind and make it fulfill that purpose well. IIRC, Presentation Zen covered this fairly well; in fact, I'm pretty sure Garr Reynolds is where I got this notion to begin with.
Re: Crap I'm speaking at [insert conference here]. How do I prepare?
#40(speaking as someone who literally gave buttloads of presentations all over the world for over a decade) if you use slides i suggest reading cliff atkinson's blog "beyond powerpoint bullets". in it he lays out ideas, principles and templates for PPTs (and any other preso tools) that tell stories. these are based on cognitive studies, like the number of bullet points you should use based on how much your audience can…
I'm curious, how did you et into the 'speaking business'? It seems a lot of these conferences only invite people to speak who have already spoken at large conferences. I did a talk at a local usergroup (5 people attended) and I loved it. I want to give talks at bigger conferences, but my proposals always get rejected. It seems once the ball is rolling, it just keeps rolling. Got any advice?