
Speaker's Tip: Don't tell the audience you aren't prepared - raghus
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1989-speakers-tip-dont-tell-the-audience-you-arent-prepared
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mrshoe
I tend to extrapolate this tip into a more general rule: no meta-talk.

For the speaker, preparing the talk has been top of mind for the past N
hours/days/weeks. Not so for the audience. If you think about the situation
from _their_ perspective, you'll realize they don't want to hear about how you
prepared the talk or how you approached the talk (usually). They want to hear
your thoughts on the topic -- the result of your preparation.

This rule generally eliminates phrases like "while preparing this talk, I
realized...", "when Joe asked me to give this talk...", "I didn't really
prepare for this talk...", "I get nervous giving talks like this...", etc.

In almost all cases, you can simply strike those phrases from the script and
your talk will be more focused and concise for it.

~~~
ivankirigin
"This slide has my favorite joke of the talk"

"Sorry this slide has a lot of text on it, I usually try to avoid it"

Reading slides is also idiotic.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Some people absorb info better when they view it, others when they hear it.
Consider it pre-prepared closed captions and then _perhaps_ it's OK?

~~~
ugh
Then why talk? Reading is faster than listening. And this alone will get your
audience horribly out of sync with you.

Use slides as a support structure, don’t duplicate what you are seeing. And if
you really want to make all those happy that prefer reading to listening don’t
just dump your uncommented slides on them afterwards.

------
pg
I would exempt Paul Buchheit because this is an integral part of all his
talks.

~~~
mrshoe
Spontaneity? Or announcing a lack of preparation at the beginning?

As Jason notes in the article, spontaneity can be a huge boon. I don't
immediately see how the latter can be, though it's possible.

I suppose paul may truly be an exception, but it seems that I would get just
as much out of his talks (which is to say, a ton) whether or not I knew how
much time he had spent in preparation.

~~~
pg
Announcing a lack of preparation. All PB talks begin with him saying that he
hasn't prepared anything; that it doesn't matter anyway, because he doesn't
have anything to say; and that in fact no one has anything to say. From which
he proceeds to tell you interesting things.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
What a very strange comment.

I wish I had heard one of these talks.

~~~
mrduncan
If you haven't seen it yet, here is a highlights video which has a brief
portion of Paul's talk as well as links to the justin.tv archived stream.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=910426>

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mrduncan
Instead of "Don't tell the audience you aren't prepared", I'd say simply "Be
Prepared".

Paul Buchheit started his talk at Startup School by telling the audience that
he was just going to wing it. I'd say he had one of the best talks of the day.
Even if he didn't spend a second thinking about what he was going say, it was
pretty obvious that he was very well prepared to give a good talk based on
previous experience.

That said, I can see where Jason is coming from. Setting expectations is an
important part of public speaking (actually it applies to a lot of things). If
you tell me you haven't prepared, the first thought that immediately comes to
mind is that the talk isn't going to be very good and I'm certainly more
likely to zone you out.

~~~
jlees
I guess that's the thing, if Paul was winging it _but_ has a great deal of
experience doing the same thing, that's totally different from Joe Random
turning up at a (paid-for) conference without slides or script and saying 'Er,
well, I didn't prepare...'. Unless Joe Random is a celebrity of some sort,
people will get pissed off.

As a total aside, winging it can be great. I far prefer that style to people
who are clearly reading from a script of sorts. My performance background's in
improv so I'm biased, but I strongly recommend anyone who wants to take up
public speaking spend some time in improv workshops. Once you can structure a
longform narrative from nothing but a word shouted by an audience member,
giving a talk is _easy_.

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tlrobinson
This seems aimed squarely at Paul Buchheit, considering it's less than a week
after Paul did exactly that at Startup School.

Interestingly I enjoyed Paul's talk more than Jason's.

~~~
paul
In person he claimed to have liked my talk :)

I'm not sure if anyone understood, but the "winging it" was supposed to be a
metaphor for startups themselves. You can never be truly prepared.

~~~
rms
The other thing is that you clearly didn't completely wing it. You had
prepared slides, as a start.

~~~
j_baker
No he didn't. I saw him writing the slides as other presenters were speaking.

(Not that I'm criticizing him. Some of my best projects in school were written
the day they were due.)

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jrockway
_People take days off of work, spend hundreds on a conference ticket, travel
for thousands of miles, and pay hefty rates for flights and hotels to come
hear you speak, and you tell them you didn’t have time to prepare a talk?
What’s cool about that?_

But of course, the speaker takes days off of work, travels thousands of miles,
and pays hefty rates for flights and hotels to come talk to you for free. I am
not sure why anyone would expect excellence in that situation.

~~~
davidw
I've gotten paid expenses for several conferences, and I'm not really a
'somebody'. Depending on the conference, 'somebodies' can definitely expect to
be paid a little something; although of course it may pale in comparison with
other revenue they may make, depending on the person/field.

~~~
jrockway
And when that happens, I expect the talk to be of higher quality. That's the
standard I hold myself to, anyway.

------
raganwald
I recently spoke at Stack Overflow's Dev Days in Toronto. I started by saying
that I am very shy and have difficulty going to networking events and
conferences where there are large groups, but that there's something I wanted
to share, and it was important enough for me to climb up on stage and stand in
front of them.

A few people later thanked me for the candour, but on reflection just because
that resonated emotionally with some people, that doesn't mean my talk was
actually _better_. Perhaps the people who responded emotionally to my
'confession' were more attentive to the ideas in the talk, but it could just
as easily be that they were distracted and absorbed less of the content.

This post and the commentary from HN folks is giving me something to think
about. Thanks everybody.

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Poiesis
This is a specific facet of a more general rule of public speaking: _don't
apologize_. It has nothing to do with your presentation, and it's likely the
audience wouldn't have noticed, anyway--so why point it out?

There is an exception to this rule, though: if the condition is A) painfully
obvious, and B) out of your control, you can apologize. Examples: air
conditioners in room broken, or jackhammers next door. But don't apologize for
your own stuff; that's just tacky.

------
npost
Some speakers can get away with it, whether as a form of humor or setting
completely unreal expectations (ie. I am not prepared, but then blows the
audience away with their knowledge).

Normal people can't do it (which most certainly includes myself!)

------
Teulon
The besr tip I could give is to join Toastmasters.

~~~
10ren
I wonder why the "reply" after your correction comment (the one which just
said "best") is in italics?

(I'm replying to this comment instead of that one so I don't destroy the thing
I'm commenting about)

~~~
Teulon
I put an asterisk after the corrected word, wonder if that matters.

~~~
10ren
Yup, it worked for my test comment. So that's a (terribly minor) bug in HN.

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arnorhs
I agree that it is ultimately disrespectful to the people attending, but on
the other hand most of them have come just to look at you in person, see you
talk (about anything really) and don't really care what you talk about or how
well you are prepared. If they respect you they'll think anything you say is
insightful.

------
DanielBMarkham
When I used to write freelance articles sometimes I would string for the local
daily and weekly newspapers. As such, they would assign me local crime stories
-- usually something that sounded interesting. "Naked man in rowboat with .22
rifle floating around shooting at birds" or some such.

I used to have one source inside the police department that could make
anything at all sound boring. He would start each interview off with "Well, it
really isn't that interesting, but I'm happy to tell you a little about it."

After 20 or 30 minutes of taped interview, eventually I would agree that yes,
it really isn't that interesting.

Since then I've made it a point never to say something bad about your
presentation or story. If it's rotten they're going to figure it out anyhow,
and no point in spoiling the suspense for them.

~~~
blasdel
_"That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they
won't screw you, don't do it for them._
<http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays/status/4811790555>

