Jeffrey Veen

Thanks. ^_^ Good stuff.

A few other rules, I learned (I've seen all of these go wrong):

1) Dress Better than Your Audience -
Seriously, people take you seriously. There's no way around it.

2) NEVER SELL - Nobody trusts folks who are "selling" to them. Even if an audience asks for your service/product; invite them to talk to you afterwards. Educate them, never pitch.

3) Be Sober - Not kidding. No lunch time martini's. Save the celebrating for after the presentation.

4) Don't Let Your Audience Take Over - There's always someone who thinks they should be up on stage, instead of you. People are there to see you, not there for a group discussion.

5) Do Whatever the Conference Organizer Tells You To - This is specifically for Veen.

I have to disagree, if only slightly. I think PowerPoint IS part of the problem, or can be for non-designers. If the presentation artwork is bad or inconsistent... when the type looks like the Ws were cut out with a boxcutter... it's worse than dressing badly. It has to detract, at least subliminally, from your credibility. If you're a speaker not a designer, you don't want to be judged on abilities you don't have.

To be the best speaker you can be, follow all 7 of Jeff's points but leave out the PowerPoint. Find another way to handle point 2. Bring in live fish in a bowl or a real tin of sardines -- even more memorable.

Good points. I would add:

Use humour. Just not as an opening joke. I'm amazed how many of my points can be illustrated by a good cartoon.

Know your audience. Be interested in what they are going to take away with them when they leave. Make it genuinely useful for them.

Do a brief practical exercise during your session if you can. Engage the ones who are getting sleepy.

Finally, (most importantly!) buy an Apple Macintosh laptop to use for your presentations. Then your PowerPoint text will be antialiased and actually look good. Better yet, purchase Apple's inexpensive Keynote software too, for a much nicer presentation package that people will notice is different from everyone else!

veen, you are a good man. thanks for sharing. this will help not only at work, but at school too.

Humour:

Bryan said be sober... no kidding;
Duncan recommended humour and cartoons.

I think they're both right. What you don't want is a session where people go out remembering Gary Larson's point rather than yours. Therefore, don't use humour that is even slightly off the point; don't use humour to over illustrate minor points. Sometimes you have to leave the funniest stuff out because it robs attention from the main point of the session.

I'd also add eye contact and movement. It's nice to move around, and I try to do it when I'm not talking. So I look at someone in the audience, make a point, give the pause Jeff recommends while I move a bit to another spot on the stage, stop, look someone else in the eye, and make the next point. It's very powerful to actually look at the people you're speaking to. And you can totally get a sense of how you're doing as a speaker and adjust your presentation accordingly. Which leads to my next point,

Don't be afraid to improvise a bit. If you get to a point that looks like it doesn't fit well for the audience, skip it. Don't plod through something just because it's in your presentation.

Oh and one more tip I got from Cory Doctorow before my first solo presentation: take questions during your talk. I was going to ask people to hold them until the end, and he encouraged me to address points as they came up. Ended up engendering a great dialog between me and the audience. And as long as you watch out for Bryan Mason's #4 (Don't let the audience take over), you have a much better way of judging how the audience is responding to your talk.

Ach, easy for you to say ;).

I saw you speak once in SF and you energy and charisma rivals Steve Jobs.

Easily one of the best presentations I ever attended -- as an attendee, it's rare to come away from these things with more energy than when you walked in.

All good suggestions. One minor point: in item 2, you mention "metaphor" but all your examples are similes, not metaphors.

Duncan,

you really don't have to buy one of those macs just to have antialiased text. The other big OS can do it just as easily, if you know where to turn it on. Good luch finding it ;)

Very good advice, thanks.

Thanks for these tips!
I just gave a guest lecture about blogs and, after reading this, see what I did wrong. I told stories and had nice Blogumentary video clips, but inbetween stared at my dumb bulletpoints and had a flaccid finish.

Keynote rocks. :-)

All of this great advice goes right out the window if your zipper is down. And never, ever, go commando on a presentation day.

Great tips! However, if I try that pause stuff among my friends, I'd never get a word in!

Have to agree with Megnut about moving around; it suggests you are feeling at ease with both your surroundings and the material. That said, there is a distinction to be made between moving around and pacing up and down - which is just annoying. Ditto an over-reliance on hand gestures.

Excellent stuff here. Also, LESS is definitely more when it comes to presentations. Have less Powerpoint and more self. Don't forget - Your audience is there to listen to you so don't disappoint them.

I have found that when I include people from my audience in the presentation helps things go over great

good comments across the board...there is something inherently limiting about Powerpoint-- one ends up talking in bullet points, similar to reading out of a daily planner (and reconsider giving out hard copies of the presentation in advance- people tend to go into auto-listening mode). shaking up an audience a trifle is a good way to be riveting. begin with a notion that contests commonplace thinking...and don't be formulaic in the direction of the presentation. as Mr. Veen says, storytelling is often a compelling approach.

Jeff Veen - good advice. I can't imagine you actually speaking without your family making fun of you, but I'm sure you do a great job. "Line caught salmon." Heh.

One additional comment would be - know your content. I once attended a viewing and discussion of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and was astounded at how little the speakers knew about the film. For some, the showing was their first viewing. So many speakers fall into this trap and don't know when to stay away from content they're not ready to present. Being able to withstand the pressure to showboat on topics you're not qualified to discuss is tough, but worth the effort.

And a tip for the girls (or guys with long hair) that I learned after watching myself on tape - tie it back, and don't play with it!

This is good.

I could have really used it the day before it was published, as I was speaking for the first time to a group of people about Web Standards.

Somebody did a list like this once and the two most important points were:

1. go to the bathroom before the presentation
2. make sure your wireless mic is off when going to the bathroom

Never spend the first 5 or 10 slides of a presentation telling the audience about your firm's organisation, structure, profits and history (unless they're VCs I guess!). Nobody cares. The opener has to be what do you people do and why should I care?

There are lots of additional, helpful suggestions - which shows you that we need "anchors" for any chain of thought - and here's one more:
Have your arms above the waistline, never drop them or have them hang down.
Thanks, Jeffrey, for providing the anchor.

thanks and congratulations on this great contribution the presentation world..this thursday I ll be giving a presentation to university Ss..and I have been searching the net to find some recent info and the dates with comments was really striking..
Wish me good luck..

very handy! but i have to give a presentation to my fellow students, try not to make it sound like a lecture AND do it in the style of the artist Robert Rouschenberg! what do i do????

I'm thimking that the Bush administration might be bankrupting us for more than the next twenty years -- but aside from that, great tips (and subsequent commentary from the peanut gallery).

I think these are really solid tips for presenting. One I would add would be practice - ALOT. The more you practice the better your speech sounds when you actually go to present it.

Great tips. I'll surely use them at the end of this semester when I have to present my project website.

Thanks, they come in handy!

That would be "People *couldn't* care less about...." If they *could* care less, then the subject is more important than other things. If they *couldn't* care less, then the subject is the least important thing to them, which is the sentiment you're trying to communicate. I know it's common to mangle this phrase to say the opposite of what it means; that's not a good reason to do so.

Bryan Mason said "Dress Better than Your Audience"
True. However if you have the combination of a management or sales person and a techie to deal with techie questions, let the techie dress worse than the audience. The techies in the audience will trust the techie more.
That said, if you're a techie and you're on your own, get a good suit.

Excellent post, and quite a few good comments too.

Here's what I would add (Angie's already mentioned the first):

Practice: Go through the entire presentation, in real-time, at least once. Make sure you can finish on time, and never trust the session chair to remind you if you can't.

Preparation: Predict questions, know the answers. Bring additional slides that might help answer or illustrate follow-up questions and comments. Print handouts (especially for longer, info-loaded presentations).

Practicalities: Make sure text and figures on slides are readable. Fire up the presentation and put yourself in place of the audience. Never trust computers or software. Back up everything to floppy and cd, and, if your slides are important, bring real slides as a foolproof backup.

Pointers: A focused, well-organized conference will have keynotes, sessions and presentations that connect. Take notes from the best and reflect on their points during your own presentation. This helps put your own work into context, gives the audience a live version of a "further reading" list, and sends a nod of approval to other presenters. Never visit unfocused, badly-organized conferences.

"Never, ever go commando on presentation day."

Unless you can't find your blue silk thong: http://perils.typepad.com/perilous/2003/10/what_would_uma_.html

This tips are strong and well giving to help others some are thing to know some are things
that should be know.

thank you

Rj Edwards

People COULDN'T CARE LESS!!

"People could care less about the five ways some ..."

These tips were truly great. I have few observation to be mentioned. And that would be to be yourself when you are presenting not try to act someone who you are not. Be cool and present in the same sense as if you are talking rather than narrating things.
I've attended presentations where either they narrate what they have learnt (studied) / trying to crack jokes where they are not supposed to.

The other point would be to keep track of time. No audience will be interested to listen to you when you cross the alloted time. Presentations should be such that audience wish to hear more from you even when you have finished.

thank you
Bharti

Tips are really great. And it helped to get acclamation in my classroom