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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Tips are fun! Here are mine:

- Make sure to provide a text version of your talk online, in a sane format.

- Keep text off your slides. Use them to show code, or kittens, but not bullet points.

- Remember that you're speaking to an intelligent audience. They'll have more fun if you leave some stuff unsaid, and let them come to their own conclusions.

- Go through the painful process of watching yourself speak on video, to identify and correct the many verbal tics you didn't know you had.

- Have a single shot of booze ten minutes before liftoff

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I do quite a few talks for work with non-native english speakers. They are pretty good english speakers in general, but it's still easy for them to get lost especially if it gets conversational with multiple people.

Initially I took to putting more text on the slides to counter that and give them some words to lock onto if they weren't catching the word or otherwise something to follow. This helped to some extent but I have since learnt what works better is to write a lot more into the "Speaker Notes" and distribute a copy of the file to them before the talk starts. Then they can follow along and when they get lost look at the speaker notes to try and get themselves in sync.

Linked in another thread is this interesting take on it for consumption after the talk.. achieves two purposes I guess. Annotated slides: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/talks/talk.pdf

Great tips. Watching myself speak is extremely painful. Last time I could only get through half of the talk. The next time I plan to sit through the whole talk. I haven't tried the last tip but I will definitely try it next time. :)

Do you write your entire talk out before you give it?

A tip I was recently given so haven't been able to fully execute on yet, is to write into the speakers notes not actual notes but instead "Questions to self" which you will then go ahead and answer.

This seems like a fantastic idea and it makes a lot of sense, given I can often make up a lot on the spot. The questions for self let me capitalise on that but also keep it on topic and in the correct direction, not forgetting things.

I never however "pre-write" my talk, but I do tend to write quite a lot of dot points or occasionally sentances into the speaker notes to try and remember.

This also works MUCH MUCH better if you can see your speaker notes in a "stage monitor" type position so you don't look away from the audience to a laptop but sadly that is rarely the case.

Yes, as many times as I can stand.

Do you memorize and rehearse the fully written-out talks?

For the most part you don't come off as having scripted the whole talk, but there are tells in your transcripts that they were written first.

I rehearse the talks but don't memorize them, if that makes any sense. The process of rewriting them ad nauseam helps me remember what to say.

I think of it as crossing a stream, and there are certain rocks that I have to make sure I step on. But getting between them is somewhat improvisational.

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