
Make Yourself Presentable  - boundlessdreamz
http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/make-yourself-presentable/
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scott_s
Practice your talk at least twice. The first time I practice a talk, I fumble
for how to word things, and I have dead time trying to figure out what and
when I should say something. The second time through, everything flows better,
which gives me the confidence for the actual talk.

I agree with what he says about slide design, but I think practicing your talk
is the most important thing. I always give extemporaneous talks. Practicing
doesn't provide you with a verbatim script, but it does provide you with
certain ready-made phrases you can pull from your mind, along with the
intuition of "I just said X, I need to make sure I mention Y."

~~~
pmjordan
Practicing is also vitally important for timing your talk. Your first attempt
will ususally take longer than desired/required, but you should be running
shorter than the target on follow-up attempts. If not, you need to cut down
the content.

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scott_s
I gave a conference talk in May that was well under the time limit - I took
barely 20 minutes in a 25 minute slot. It was a much smoother talk than one I
gave in March where I tried to fit more material in. From now on, I'm going to
err on the side of including less material, and giving myself more breathing
room.

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amalcon
People always do it backwards. Don't make slides, and then present them. Make
a talk, then make some slides to support it.

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mhb
My daughter uses this type (Lessig-style?) of presentation in middle school.
The class and teacher love it. Every other kid has about 30 minutes of
unbearable, traditional Powerpoint slides filled with text that they read.

It's great practice for her. What surprises me is that even after seeing and
appreciating this style of presentation several times the other kids persist
with the old way.

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adw
There's a killer point in the comments.

If you're going to share the presentation, it's a decent idea to have a deck
to present with and a deck to hand out later. If your presentation deck's a
good read, that's what half your audience'll wind up doing instead of
listening to you!

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chipsy
One trick a professor of mine used for slides was to blank out key words and
phrases, so that the viewer sees a mystery and has to listen closely to the
speech to find out the answer. Very effective trick.

As for presenting itself, that's all about practice. I usually paraphrase my
written speech each time I practice so that I stay involved in the content,
vs. just reading it.

~~~
Elepsis
This has always struck me as a combination of the worst of both worlds. By
definition, if you're just omitting words in your slides that means you're
coming close to reading them. And at the same time, you've made certain that
your slides are useless after the fact.

In fact, that technique just strikes me as a lazy way for professors to force
students to pay attention to presentations that are apparently not otherwise
interesting enough.

~~~
chipsy
A comprehensive slide will make the perceived value of the lecture and the
slides equivalent. Hence you will skim over a slide and say, "oh, they're
talking about this thing now" and then go comatose for the next few minutes.
Leaving a single fact as an open question acts to raise the perceived value of
everything else.

The slides aren't useless afterwards because the version put up afterwards may
contain all the words.

Saying this is lazy is like saying that giving students problem sets without
giving solutions simultaneously is lazy. It's the same principle - if you give
out solutions, you are asking the students to not cheat by working backwards
from the answer, to have 100% motivation to understand the problems on their
own. No student is always that motivated all of the time in all of their
coursework, but tricks like that will induce them to the extra effort.

Teaching has both "hard" techniques and "soft" ones. Using both will speed
learning.

~~~
Elepsis
That's why your slides should be _supporting_ your talk. The deck shouldn't be
comprehensive -- your presentation of it should be. And if "the version put up
afterwards may contain all the words"--if that's all that it takes to finish
off the presentation--then, again, you're taking an annoying shortcut to try
and get people's attention which will only serve to piss them off.

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cellularmitosis
wtf? whenever my mouse happens to be over any of the orange "heading" text,
the scroll wheel doesn't work. how could he have possibly broken that?

~~~
mbrubeck
He's using Flash to embed different fonts into the document (SIFR), and the
Flash plugin eats mouse events. Please, let real web fonts be widely supported
soon...

~~~
kevinholesh
Typekit (<http://typekit.com/>) will rock your world. It lets you embed
certain fonts in any browser (even IE5).

