On Giving Technical Talks[2010] | Hacker News Reader

On Giving Technical Talks[2010]

erdani.com

29 pointsgsivil4 comments

That was some really great advice and I like the fact that he kept coming back to confidence. Confidence in your subject, your ability to deliver and in the quality of your presentation is key.

One thing I would add though is regarding visuals. If you present with a slide deck make sure there is an absolute minimum of words on each slide. People will read every slide you put up, and while they are reading, they are not listening to you. The human brain just isn't modeled to be able to handle listening to one thing, while reading another.

thanks for the tips. I have the problem where I start out pretty confident but as I get into the speech sometimes I start getting nervous that I'm losing everybody's interest and so I think my presentation sometimes gets worse as it goes on.

Try cutting out some of the stuff people tend to find boring. Or change the way it's presented.

Maybe your audience doesn't understand what you're trying to tell, maybe they already know.

Try to adapt on the fly.

Patrick Henry Winston's "How to Speak" has been so helpful, I often briefly skim it right before I give a talk: (http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9F536001A3C605FC)

I come into talks letting go of part of my ego, and come to see it just as my job to offer them something (intellectually) interesting. So upon sensing something's not working out, I might ask the audience a question to calibrate myself, quickly jettison it, or otherwise adjust.

(But not dropping all my ego. For some absurd reason, it helps to think of myself as enormously knowledgeable, and they're benefitting from this yapping... Sort of the opposite of the useful "I don't know a goddamn thing!" I prefer to feel when developing the talk in the first place. If someone in the audience happens to know what I know, like a previous speaker who touched upon what I'm saying, I often find myself including them in the talk somehow. If a significant fraction of the audience may know what I'm saying, I invite them to leave and take a pleasant break, so as not to be bored.)

Also, when thinking of part of my talk beforehand, I say the words out loud, which improves the fluency, and lets me hear more as an audience might. I did this recently on my way to work; saying and adjusting those words made them come out more fluently, because those parts of my cognitive system were already practiced.

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