
How to Prep for a Presentation - jamesbritt
http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/read/how-i-prep-for-a-speech
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friggeri
A few other tips I gathered from my conference experience:

In a conference spanning several days, know before the conference on which day
and at what time you are speaking, and know when the social events are. If you
are speaking on the last day, or after a social event, market your talk
beforehand or you'll have a smaller audience.

Have a bottle of water on stage with you, not soda or coffee. If your talk
lasts more than 20 minutes, believe me, you'll need a sip now and then. Taking
a short break to drink is OK, you can use the silence to highlight the point
you just made.

Speaking of silence, don't feel the need to talk all the time, use silences
and pauses, it adds rhythm to your presentation. Don't forget you are the
expert, the audience is not, they might need some time to digest the
information you are giving.

As an expert, you might want to shove everything you know in your talk. Don't
do that, ignore the smaller details and focus on the story. No one care about
the small optimization you have spent a month tweaking (unless this is the
topic of your talk). Focus on the broader picture.

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bobbydavid
I like this article as an excellent behind-the-scenes of all the prep work
that goes into a talk.

That said, one key element is missing: the enthusiasm/delivery of the talk
itself. What I mean is it's not enough to know the talk -- you also have to
"know" the enthusiasm.

Personally, I think this is the hardest part, because enthusiasm is usually
built up between people (as in you are talking to a friend, they get more
excited, so do you, and each feeds off the other). When you present, there is
no "other person" to feed off of, meaning you have to create that mood all by
yourself. Presenters who do this are very desirable to listen to, regardless
of what they're presenting.

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cjoh
You're absolutely right. I'm the author, and I left that part out entirely. I
think there are a lot of posts giving that kind of advice already, and while
important, I had a hard time figuring out how to do the prepwork it took to be
able to do that stuff, so I stuck with that.

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espinchi
There are some great tips in this article.

However, I would only go through this amount of preparation for a really
_really_ important talk. I think 50% of this effort would lead to a talk
that's 80% as good. Under most situations, I'd take this route.

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nyar
Lucid dreaming is one of the best methods to prepare for anything.

