With a well-prepared presentation, you can impress bosses, convince customers to buy your product, get support for your project or simply tell everybody what you think needs to be done. Giving a good presentation is therefore important for you, and vital to the topic you’re presenting. Why can presentations become scary to everyone involved?
As a casual presenter, you may be an expert on the subject at hand, but
are anxious to speak in front of an audience of strangers. The audience, on the other hand, might be having a hard time to catch up with slides packed full with information, while the monotonous and mumbling voice of the speaker seems to be of no help, either.
Then what makes a great presentation?You know, the kind of presentation everyone is talking about. To my mind, giving great talks is not at all reserved to the few among us who can sell refrigerators to Eskimos.
A good presentation is not about the speaker.
It’s about communicating ideas and igniting the audience!
Pragmatically spoken – less is more!
Even if you’re an expert speaking in front of experts, this is no excuse for misusing slides as transcripts.
Try to be passionate, the way you would when talking to friends about the subject!
… and how we almost failed to deliver a good one!
OK, let’s talk about our presentational endeavors now.
Back in December 2009, our team, the Part-Time Scientists, got invited to give a presentation at the 26C3 Congress in Berlin. It was the single biggest event for all of us speakers. I was obviously one of them, and I’m going to let you in on what went wrong and what went well.
As we wanted to have an expert for each subject – aerospace, engineering, development and organization – we split the presentation into four sections and settled for a two-hour time slot. Three weeks before the presentation, we started working on the slides. To cut a long story short: the four of us ended up preparing tons of notes and page-long text files with information. Then, shortly before the conference, I got myself a copy of the book slide:ology. A good friend of mine had found it on Safari Online. Slide:ology deals with all the things that can ruin your presentation, and shows how real experts do their preparation.
We threw all our text files overboard. We reworked the slides and made them as plain as possible. It was a hell of a lot of work, and in the end, we had two days left for practicing. The amount of last-minute adjustments, however, left me with almost no time for practicing, plus, I got no more than two hours of sleep the night before the presentation!
Not everything worked out as expected but …
against all odds, our presentation went quite well!
And we had learned our lesson.
To give a good presentation, you should:
- start preparing right away, even if the deadline is three months away.
- spread the word via Twitter, Facebook or any other medium.
- invest a good amount of time working on the slides. My advice: do check out slide:ology!
- practice, practice, practice! The minute you finished your first slides, try to practice with them using a timer. What really helped us was recording our trials on webcam. Be yourself and be authentic.
- Try to get sufficient rest! If some of your slides aren’t perfect, just leave them that way. You’re the expert, you’re the speaker — your slides won’t change anything about this.
And always remember – have fun!
Robert – a Part-Time Scientist
