This is going to be a rather ironic post since I don’t consider myself (yet) all that great a presenter and it is not meant to be (overly) critical of people, but, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a bit and today solidified some of it. What follows are things that detract from presentation (at conferences or elsewhere) and/or things I have learned when doing my speaking.

  • The Lessig style of preparing slide decks is nice
  • The quality of your template affects the outcome of your slides dramatically
  • Do not overrun the boundaries of your template in distracting ways
  • Too much content on a slide is too much content on a slide
  • Trying to code live rarely works and results in silly type-o’s more often than not
  • If you are running applications or scripts during your presentation make sure they have been tested on the machine being used during the presentation. All of them. Not just all but a couple.
  • Have resource external to your deck pre-loaded
  • If you are presenting on a topic, you should absolutely own your content. You might not have thought of it originally and you might be rehashing it to a new audience, but have internalized it enough that you can convince people of your ‘expertise’. You don’t have to be the ultimate expert, just make the audience feel you are more expert than them
  • Check that you have your various personal security-blankets with you before leaving the house for the conference / event
  • Do not print out your slides and hold them in front of your face and read things. If you need documentation to help you then just have a couple pages with cues. Or if something is a long quote then have just that quote. Reading from your slides without elaboration is not instilling the belief of expertise.
  • If showing books either in their dead-tree format or in your deck, don’t accompany them with ‘I used these to do my research for this presentation.’ Cite them as ‘for additional information see these…’ The former conveys that you don’t know enough to really be presenting. That is heuristic of course, but again, if you are at the front of the room you are the expert.
  • Printing out large decks with a nice binding makes things start out on a professional note. (I wish I had done that along with code listings for my tutorial)
  • Whenever possible, learn about the demographic of the audience and tailor appropriately.

And yes, I know I am guilty of more than a couple of these. (I did say there was some irony about me writing this.) But I am less guilty of them now than I was a year ago; especially with my QA101 course which I can do without the crutch of a deck and be just as effective.