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Start presentations on the second slide

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455 pointsandyjohnson0152 comments

I gave a talk at PyCon a few weeks ago where I was really struggling to fit my content into the time slot.

I ended up editing out the first couple of minutes of the talk - the bit where I ramped up to the topic, gave a little bit of background about why I was qualified to talk about it, that kind of thing.

Instead I launched straight into my first point (which included a good joke)... and it worked.

A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's attention just fine.

> A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's attention just fine.

This is important in sales as well.

I hate getting a sales pitch where they tell me the history of the company. Big Japanese companies are the worst in this regard for some reason.

For each slide, imagine the audience is going to get up and leave unless you give them a reason to read the next slide. You don't need to justify your existence if I don't really know what you have to offer.

Plus it's all about me (the listener) not you (the presenter).

> I hate getting a sales pitch where they tell me the history of the company. [...] Plus it's all about me (the listener) not you (the presenter).

Excellent point. Many presenters probably see the talk as an opportunity to give their organization some publicity/marketing[0] in addition to the content of the talk. But... no, no one wants to sit through an ad about you and your company's background in order to get to the interesting stuff.

I think a reasonable compromise there is that your last slide can have a blurb about your company on it, and maybe you just leave it there for attendees to read themselves (or not) as you wrap up, without reading it to them.

[0] I imagine this is a component of why companies encourage their employees to go give talks at conferences. I remember one company I worked at would completely reimburse employees for conference attendance, no questions asked, if they were also giving a talk there. But if they just wanted to attend the conference, they had to justify what they and the company would be getting out of it, and write up and present something useful they learned when they got back. I wouldn't be surprised if they booked some of the cost as a marketing expense in the first case.

> For each slide, imagine the audience is going to get up and leave unless you give them a reason to read the next slide.

This is great advice, and I’ve been trying to apply it to my writing in general. Each sentence, and even each word, should give your reader a reason to stick around. Fluff has its place in fiction and long-form writing, but most day-to-day writing should be information-dense.

Just to share a perspective. Doing business in Japan often requires a certain level of trust. Showing that you (the presenter) have something to count on is thus important.

I should have written that I hate such presentations when the history is up front. Tell me what you’re gonna do for me, tell me how so I believe you, tell me that you’ve been doing it a while for others so I believe you, then, if you want, tell me that you’ve been around for a while so I can depend on you.

But all that should be provided my my interests in mind, not your own ego stroking.

That said, different countries have different cultures in this regard. But peoples’ attention isn’t different and it’s a shame to waste the period of maximum attention on the thing that helps the least in sales.

I agree, but one good thing about starting with the soft and boring parts (like your name and credentials), is that it's easy to do when you're nervous in the beginning. Can't really stumble that too much, and then you're warmed up for the real talk. But of course, the shorter you can keep it the better. Instead I often try to memorize my first lines, word by word. Then I know I will nail them when at my most anxious, and then the rest can be talking more freely.

I also assumed that part of the first few minutes was filler while butts are still trying to find seats, still chatting amongst themselves, or haven't quite closed whichever social media app as well as letting the presenter shake off any butterflies

That's a good point.

A presentation isn't really a written story or even a film. You don't want the people who missed the first few minutes to be "dazed and confused." :-) You don't want to do too much throat clearing (to use the metaphor a former boss used with respect to writing research pieces). But you probably don't want the first few minutes to be too essential to be jumping into the rest of the talk either.

I always have the title and my name and organisation on the first slide, which is just shown while everybody comes in. That lets everyone know if they're in the right place.

And I do usually have a bio slide right after as well. But I spend about 15 seconds on it. I also (usually) have basic contact info on my slide masters so people know how to contact me without snapping a shot of the right slide.

I like to put my name, contact info, and reference link on the last slide. This is when they’ll actually need it (if they want to follow up with you), latecomers won’t miss it, and it’s usually on the screen for a long time during q&a so people have time to jot it down or snap a picture.

Nothing makes me more nervous than talking about myself… I pretty much always skip the intro slides (other than having my name on the title).

People appreciate it. Seriously.

A big pet peeve of mine is long intros. 30 seconds is probably fine but minutes is way too long. This goes for talks, youtube videos, etc.

I get why people do it, they want to reduce risk by addressing things that could go wrong (is this person qualified? I don’t understand the context. Etc) but man be a little brave and get to the point.

Unfortunately, I think YouTube rewards you for this. At least it feels that way based on how long YouTube video’s take to get to the point

This might be caused by mid-roll ads. Videos need to be 8 minutes long to qualify for those, and you want people to actually reach the ad.

"hi, I'm x, I work at y, and have had an interest in/experience with z" is ussally good enough.

It's a bit of an audience thing, but for a talk at a technical conference I tend to roll my eyes at introduction slides. I already chose to attend your talk, telling me why it's interesting is preaching to the choir. And typical hacker ethic involves judging people by their skills, not their credentials. You can slip in a "btw I invented the thing we are talking about". But don't read me your CV, impress me with your insights.

This isn't true in all contexts. Some audiences care a lot about credentials. And if people don't choose to be at your talk specifically you have to give enough context. But even then you are often better off catching their attention first, and once you got it bring it back to the introduction

I think there is a lot of cargo culting in presentations. Title slide? But of course we must have a title slide, that is the way. And an introduction, and motivation... everybody else has one!

Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a presentation, and separately as a way to learn or review material outside of the presentation. Unfortunately they are at cross-purposes. For accompanying an oral presentation you don't want lots of data, you want a simple clear image that sync with what you are saying, and to change them rapidly. For learning outside the actual presentation, you want rich, detailed slides with lots of data on them, and leave them up for a while so people can absorb the information.

Ideally, we would build two different decks, each optimized for their purpose. But no one has time for that, so people try and do both in one deck, generally going with lots of information except for one or two images keyed to specific jokes. And it makes the whole thing less effective.

I think bullet points capture the worst of both worlds. You have text (which people focus on, rather than on the presenter), but you don't have enough that one could learn from them outside the presentation.

There's a saying that bullet points are called so because they 'kill' a presentation, and I think there's some truth to that.

I think short bullet points are great. That way the audience can take them in quickly (I highlight one at a time to prevent them from reading ahead/behind) without being distracted for more than a fraction of a second. It also helps people to see how many items are being discussed (e.g., "there are three reasons that language X is better than language Y"). For me at least, that makes it easier to remember the reasons, since it functions as a checksum.

Do you mean that full paragraph is better? Strong disagree if so.

Perhaps not full paragraphs, but the phrase-style nature of bullet points has never really helped me understand the material. If there must be text, I would rather see complete sentences on a presentation.

I've used the assertion-evidence framework[0] for presentations[1] before, where the idea is to have a complete sentence at the top of your slide, with images below that illustrate your point.

[0] https://www.assertion-evidence.com/ [1] While these presentations _were_ about engineering, they were more educational than technical in nature.

Ideally you'd have slides purely for presentation, and an accompanying interactive self-contained HTML document for the documentation of the talk.

And nobody wants to do both (or has the incentive to do both). I'll do sorta-both but probably in an informal way--e.g. article that grew out of a talk--or vice versa.

I've been doing annotated versions of my talks for a while, takes. Few hours of extra effort but greatly increases the impact the talk can have: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotatedtalks/

Maybe it's because I write a lot but I reached the conclusion that if it makes sense to do an article/blog, I should do so rather than speaker notes--which make sense in handing off a presentation to someone else in a company setting but I'm less sold on, in general, as a personal thing.

> Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a presentation...

Many years ago I went to a presentation on giving good presentations, focusing on making good slide decks. (It's currently annoying me that I can't remember where this was, even though I can picture the room in my head.)

The presenter had a short example slide deck, and gave a mock technical presentation using it.

The deck had a different, eye-catching background image for each slide, chosen to be noticeable, but not dominate attention, and be well-suited color-wise for any text or images to be placed on top of the background. The presenter suggested that the background image didn't need to have anything to do with the content of the slide, and that it's mainly there for its general visual impact. The slides were not uniformly designed. It wasn't like someone had used a template where the title, text, images, etc. were all in the same or similar places on each slide. The most noticeable part of this was putting the title in different places. This variety was in itself engaging.

The slides themselves were very light on text, and were mostly about presenting charts, graphs, tabular data, or images relevant to the talk. When there was text, the presenter never read the text verbatim (or sometimes even at all); the text there was a jumping-off point to discuss in detail whatever the topic of the slide was. The argument there was that people know how to read, can read in their heads faster than you can read to them out loud, and if you're just going to read slides to them, you don't need to present it and you should instead just email a document for your attendees to read, and skip the presentation entirely.

Finally, the slide deck itself did not have all that many slides. The presenter dwelled on each slide a lot longer than I've seen in most presentations. The slides were more guideposts to mark the overall topics and outline of the presentation, to provide milestones and transitions. For the most part, the presentation could have been done without the slides at all; the slides were there to add visual flair, help keep attention, and (occasionally) prevent data or images that would be easier to understand visually rather than spoken.

Ultimately I found the mock presentation given to be incredibly engaging, much more so than the vast majority of presentations I'd attended before or have attended since, and I remember that the topic wasn't even something that would usually hold my interest so tightly. I very rarely gave/give presentations, but I've tried to take all this to heart when I had the opportunity to do so. I don't think I ever really did the variety-of-background-images thing (honestly, I never enjoyed giving presentations, and treated it as a chore, and never felt motivated enough to find a bunch of suitable background images). But I at least always tried to keep text to a minimum, so the meat of my talk would be in what I was saying out loud. I wouldn't call myself a particularly good presenter or public speaker, but I think my talks were better than they otherwise would have been.

> Slides have two distinct purposes: [...] as a way to learn or review material outside of the presentation

I've come to think that slides aren't very good for this second purpose, and probably shouldn't be. The information density is never going to be high enough, and if it is, that's going to make for a terrible slide during the presentation. I would much rather read a transcript of the talk later, or, better, a detailed summary. If the slides have charts or other data, then sure, it's useful to have those outside of the talk, but those can also be inserted in-line into the transcript or summary.

I get that it's more work to write up a transcript or summary (and I know I myself would probably balk at having to do this), but if you've prepared properly for the presentation, you probably already more or less have something approaching a transcript in your talk notes. Cleaning them up for publication isn't zero effort, of course, but it should be much less work than writing something from scratch.

Handouts and speaker notes are a thing, although people rarely use them both when building presentations and when reviewing them later.

In many contexts, the title slide is there to let people know they are in the right place or to let people know what a presentation is about while they wait for things to begin. It is not necessarily a part of the talk itself.

If it is up and the subject of discussion for the first five minute (or more!), I will agree that something has gone wrong.

A motivation slide can be useful if you are giving a presentation to people who are more experienced than you (which, for any given audience, there ought to be some). It tells them what built in assumptions you made without being aware of.

The presentation may eventually be viewed by people who aren't in the room to hear you speak. In that instance, a title/intro slide makes perfect sense.

You don’t need to present from the same copy of the slides you distribute.

What you're saying makes sense, though "cargo culting" is not the right term here

Counterpoint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

> Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.

> Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle.

Arguably, designing a presentation in a particular way out of habit or convention would fall under one or both of these definitions.

It's a common vernacular usage.

> As awareness of cargo cults spread in the West, they became a metaphor for empty promises and rituals, used most prominently by physicist Richard Feynman. The term "cargo-cult programming" appeared in version 2.5.1 of the Jargon File, a glossary of computing slang, released in January 1991.

Kind of a long-winded way of saying "I agree"

You originally said:

> "cargo culting" is not the right term here

I don’t agree, and I explained why, because I believe that it is the right term here.

I guess I convinced you?

Despite saying you don't agree, your copy-paste definition that followed actually said otherwise

I never said I don’t agree that it was the right word to use? Just so we’re clear, you agree that it’s the right word to use?

If habit and convention == cargo cult, then the term is mostly useless; apart for its insult potential.

To make it more useful we can move the goalpost back to the roots, to include clear cluelessness and uselesness.

(General slide advice is at same level as code indentation; almost everybody does it mostly same way; familiar == comfortable)

This is the original grandparent post context that I was responding to:

> I think there is a lot of cargo culting in presentations. Title slide? But of course we must have a title slide, that is the way. And an introduction, and motivation... everybody else has one!

The implied lack of justification, or doing something because that is simply how everyone else does it is consistent with the definition I posted from Wikipedia. It’s not mere habit or convention, but habit or convention without knowing the meaning or context.

> To make it more useful we can move the goalpost back to the roots, to include clear cluelessness and uselesness.

Again, I didn’t make this argument, so there’s no goalpost to move. You’re responding to things I didn’t say, and/or reading what I did say out of context. This is a misreading of my post, the GP post and wider context I placed my post in, and/or a straw man, or we actually are in agreement.

My original post:

>> Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.

>> Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle.

> Arguably, designing a presentation in a particular way out of habit or convention

(and without knowing why that is conventional, or if that way of doing things has no known or stated justification, but is observed because that is the way things are done out of institutional momentum, and so on)

> would fall under one or both of these definitions.

Right, that's just the normal way people learn to do something they haven't been trained or educated to do. Look at how other people successfully do it. You don't just discard every feature you don't immediately see the value of or you might jettison the important bits. Once you're more confident you understand the skill, you can drop the rituals you don't find useful.

something something chesterton's fence

So true.

Some people are just allergic to accepting advise from others.

(On the other hand best way to learn not to play with fire is to get burned)

Knowing your audience is a big thing in general.

If the talk isn't to some large degree about your journey, that probably shouldn't be the focus. But also, face it, your talk isn't going to work for everyone. When I was doing a lot of keynotes, I'd get feedback on the same talk to the effect of "That was great. It really helped me understand $X" and "I was totally lost." Even given technical difficulty ratings, no one pays any attention.

I think the main value of the first two slides is: if you’ve done a lot of presentations it can be difficult to keep them straight.

The first slide is really for you, to make sure you opened the right file.

The title slide I see more for the audience: You are in the right room (and there was no schedule change you missed) that's also why I try to keep the title on that slide as announced.

Something I noticed while writing is that the intro is necessary... for me, to write the rest of the document. But after it's all written then the intro material becomes unnecessary boilerplate.

An alternative is to do the first couple minutes of your talk at 2x speed and then suddenly slow down to a normal pace when you reach the interesting part. That should get their attention.

Unless people show up late for the talk.

I once had the first morning time slot at a conference. Despite the breakfast break before (or rather because of it...), the room filled like a progress bar.

It's the Wadsworth Constant for talks! https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...

I've gotten a lot of training on presentations while in grad school and my former advisor used to often quiz us during our practices.

One thing is to treat the first slide as a kinda holding place while you're not talking. Like the cover of a book, and nothing more.

One of the things he would do to "trick" us is introduce us in various ways. The two common ways would be

  And our next speaker will discuss BlahBlah

To which you respond

  Thanks SoAndSo. I'm Godelski and I'll be discussing *next slide* BlahBlah

The other is

  And our next speaker is Godelski and he'll be presenting his work on BlahBlah

Which you respond with

  Thanks SoAndSo. *next slide*

There's a few variations (including no introduction) and they're all formulated in this way that you don't repeat the information from the person introducing you and you move away from your T̶i̶t̶l̶e̶Placeholder Slide quickly. It is only there for saying who you are and what the talk is about. If any more information is to be conveyed to the audience, you should not be on that slide.

There's also a lot more to what goes into the slides and how to organize them but that's less general. Other than I think it is quite helpful to have outline slides even if they're only seen for <1 second (often more important because slides get posted online. I like to use slides for talking so they don't post well online and I wish when they were it was easy to include slide notes. This works fine for Google slides but not PDFs. Maybe someone can push for a new paradigm here. I feel like we could likely do this with beamer, if it is not already done).

My technical presentations are pretty popular and non-technical people pass my slides around the company, despite having no interest in the topic…

- Having a story is the bread and butter. A presentation will not be interesting without a story

- I regularly comb through my slides as I’m building the presentation to make sure the story flows

- As you watch my presentation, a ton of information will never just appear on the screen. I use the PowerPoint timeline so slides slowly form as I speak, almost as if I was using a whiteboard. No one likes being confronted with a wall of text on a slide advance

- I don’t avoid text only slides but I rarely have them because they are rarely the best way to tell my story or the concept

- I also regularly read through my presentation as I’m building it to make sure it never gets too technical (aka boring) or too non-technical (aka boring). There is a fine balance and if you suddenly have to get too technical, you have to pull back in the next few slides and vice versa

- Despite having very little text, you can actually print out my slides and they still make sense and tell you everything that you need to know because I use a lot of hand drawn visualizations that exactly describe the concept

Lastly, I have to say that it doesn’t matter what app you use to make presentations. A bad artist blames his tools. I personally use PowerPoint because it has both iPad Pencil support and also a full blown animation timeline so are basically making a movie if you know how to use it, although I mostly use it to split slides into smaller parts.

Is it possible for your to share any of those presentations?

Hi, mind sharing the links of your talks or slides? Thanks!

I always start a technical presentation with "spoilers", for anyone who is busy or is happy to just trust me, they can leave almost immediately with the most important bit of information. Anyone else who wants disagree, or wants proof any claims can get involved.

Similar to BLUF -- Bottom Line Up Front.

Hear that one used more for memos or emails, but same concept. Give people a sense of what's at the end so they see where the background is going. Use the story-spine if you want, but show a trailer to convince the audience there's some juicy explosion-ladden scenes at the end of the rainbow.

Depends on the audience. I've seen presentations to Director-and-VP types that wouldn't progress past the first (fact summary) slide. You'll present a nice summary of your results with the high level conclusions, and someone will open their mouth and say "Well, what about Detail X that I heard about? How did you account for that?" and you say "We'll get to that, it's actually explained on slide 6." "Well, I heard through Dave that..." now you have to either discuss it immediately without the slide's context, or awkwardly scroll to slide 6 for the guy. Then some other exec pipes in with "But, my team's component Y was not included here at all!" and you say, "That's slide 3. I was planning on that being my first topic, but we got side tracked with Detail X..." Then the original exec "Speaking of Detail X, what about SubDetail Z, which I notice you left off [the summary slide]..." Uggghhhhh kill me now.

In a previous life where I did a lot of presentations to Bill Gates, I had the opposite problem. He insisted on having the presentation printed out for him ahead of time, and he would usually have read and understood them (no idea when he would have time to do that). So you’d be on slide 2 going through your careful introduction, and he would ask an uncomfortable question about something on slide 12!

The Amazon method of starting with quiet reading may be the only solution…

Those execs sound like terrible communicators. It’s hard for me to imagine a colleague acting this way in real life.

If you've never had a co-worker or manager interrupt you mid-sentence to breathlessly ask you a question that is literally answered by the second half of the sentence you were GOING to finish, then my friend you should go buy a lottery ticket because this happens to me daily, in every job I have ever had in the last 20 years in tech.

> If you've never had a co-worker or manager interrupt you mid-sentence

I've had plenty of people interrupt me to ask questions while I'm presenting - which I think is generally something to be encouraged.

When I've replied with "That's a very insightful question, we'll get to the answer in a few slides time" I've never had someone insist on continuing the interruption.

Exactly, this is how you do it.

I have been in some meetings where the "big boss" cannot follow any structure and will constantly throw out ideas and enquiries and demand we had ready answers for questions we are hearing for the first time or topic that was not on the agenda and pontificate about how some things should be better etc.

Thankfully they only attended our meetings once a quarter and never involved in matters beyond pontification.

I’ve run into this a few times. At first I think it must be me, that I’m not communicating correctly. But then I see everyone else run into the buzzsaw, despite differences in style and approach, and I realize the “exec” is simply an interrupt-driven dopamine fiend. Inevitably they get rotated along, because having the attention span of a coke-addled squirrel is not actually good for business.

If you can’t wait them out, or if they’re the CEO, find a different job.

Oh, it’s real, and goes down exactly as GP describes.

As a presenter in that situation you should tell them to shut it or leave, and take notes so they remember the questions they have for after the presentation.

If they refuse to comply, leave.

This seems like a great way to speedrun losing your job.

Yea, I'm gonna tell my boss's boss's boss's boss to "shut it or leave." That's a bold strategy, Cotton, lets see if it pays off...

It's not a loss if management consists of a bag of dicks.

No, I'm pretty sure that it's a loss to not have income coming in while you scramble to find a new job.

This is about a person that gets invited to hold presentations to upper management, and thus unlikely to have to "scramble".

This tracks with the product demo idea of ‘do the last thing first’. No need to make the audience ‘earn’ the payoff - just skip right to the good stuff and then go over the rest for the folks that care. (This and much more from reviews of a whole bunch of demos here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220126051034/https://www.secon...)

I do that with all the blog articles I write: start with a summary, with full reusable code you can copy/paste when appropriate.

That's what I want from others, so that's what I do.

Let the ego aside, be useful.

Yeah, the inverted pyramid[1] is almost always a good pattern when conveying important information. Not only do you end up telling people why they should care first, the less interesting stuff ends up at the end, so if you run over time (or someone zones out), they aren't missing much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

In practice, this ends up with attendees interrupting with pointless questions that are covered in the next slides

I think that is an invariant of presentations

“I’m okay, the bull is dead”, for presentations.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1702433/i-m-ok-the-bul...

While I get the point made in the article, I'd prefer being told "I hit a bull with my car. I'm ok, but the car is damaged" first, rather than having fed bits and pieces of info slowly, or worse, having to fish it out.

It's understandable for people to not be calm in this situation and struggle to explain things clearly, but it sounds like that wasn't the case here. So if you are calm, do the other person a favor and give a 10-15 second explanation of what happened instead of leaving them guessing.

Big discussion about that last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37087459

Same principles as BLUF, Bottom line up front. Start with the punchline and the impact, then fill in the background that lead up to these events.

> “Please, God, kill me now.”

Who among us hasn't had that exact reaction?

A technical presentation still needs a story. This is standard storytelling technique -- you start with the inciting event, the hook that gets you interested.

How does The Matrix start? With Trinity about to get caught. Bambi? Mom gets shot. Star Wars? A tiny ship is getting chased by a huge ship with lasers.

A good tech presentation follows good storytelling: 1) Inciting event, build to a semi-climax, pull back a little, hit the climax, then conclusion.

If you want to be a great technical presenter, read some books on telling good stories. :)

Yes, although I think you have to be careful not to piss audiences off with that technique. E.g. think of those too-long form articles that start "<Interesting hook and then...> David lives in a 3 bedroom house in rural blah with his two dogs, boopy and bloppy...". Instant close.

I did an amazing presentation course once run by a comedian. He was very very good, and the main advice that stuck with me was to have your presentation follow the hero's tale. Everyone knows it: all is good, tragedy strikes, problem is overcome, celebrate.

You might think that you can't fit technical talks into that format, and I wouldn't say every presentation needs to be like that. But it's applicable way more often than you'd think.

Basically anything that solves a problem can be told like this. But too many presentations are like "I'm going to tell you about the X project. Here's an overview of the slides. Right, what is X?" instead of "We have a lot of things that do Y. This all worked great until Z, then disaster! Existing solution A doesn't work at all for this case. So we created X. But it didn't work because ... so we had to do ..., and finally everything worked!"

> I think you have to be careful not to piss audiences off with that technique. E.g. think of those too-long form articles that start "<Interesting hook and then...> David lives in a 3 bedroom house in rural blah with his two dogs, boopy and bloppy...". Instant close.

I would say that’s because the example is the antithesis of the advice given.

In this case, I don’t know who David is, I don’t care. Why are you telling me about him.

Bambi starts off with him being born - his mother doesn't die til the middle of the movie.

Fascinating, you're absolutely right! Apparently I'm not the only one who got it wrong:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/8w0ewm/me_an...

A technical presentation benefits greatly from the use of storytelling techniques.

My recommendation is: start with an image (no text) on the first slide. It is important that the image has seemingly nothing to do with the topic of the talk that was on the (unnumbered) title slide.

Now people are curious what explanation you are giving, and are paying attention.

After resolving the mystery, you can move on to the second slide, you can give e.g. a problem statement or research question and then follow with the usual structure (outline, method, data, experiments, evaluation results, discussion and limitations, summary, conclusions and future work.

Caveat: This works only for oral presentations; there is an important type of slide deck with is the predominant type in large international corporations, and it's a mix between PPT presentation and Word document, where slides are full of text so that the deck is self-explanatory. Those are written not just to be presented but MOSTLY for being passed around by email to be read. They intentionally violate all the rules of good slide decks to accompany good presentations, because they are mainly used to summarize e.g. a new business case for senior management, who may never listen to the presentation, but who may browse the slides.

There's a related medium where I think similar advice applies, technical papers. At least for my field - computer vision / machine learning. You choose a cool, hopefully self-explanatory, figure to feature prominently in the first page. Something that will grab the attention of someone flipping through pdfs and get them hooked. In computer vision you can usually find something visually appealing, like a 3D reconstruction, or an image with highlighted object detections. If nothing else, you can go with a plot showing how much better your method is compared to a baseline, but that's probably less engaging for people who aren't super familiar with how meaningful the numbers are.

The hardest thing sometimes is to capture audience’s attention and spark curiosity

For demos, I long ago learned to "start with the good part."

If you have some fantastic monitoring software, don't start with an intro for how you installed it, how you set up the metrics collection, how you hooked the front end up to the time series database, then show a cool graph with info that the user never had before.

Instead: start by showing a cool graph they never had before. Explain why that graph is so useful. And THEN, now that everyone cares...you can take the time to show how you got to nirvana.

I've seen so many demos that start with a longish, boringish process to get someplace cool, and they would have been better had they started by showing something cool.

Genius for technical presentations.

I must admit, though, I’m always turned off when entertainment mediums do this (fiction novels, TV Shows, etc.). If the action sequence doesn’t need any background info to make sense, I argue you can just skip the background info altogether. Don’t ramp the pace up and then drop it back down to nothing so quickly.

News stories do this a lot, particularly sports or politics. But I suppose they lead with the most important part of the story so there's a reason for it.

In entertainment mediums it often feels like a last-minute band-aid. A novel ramps up too slowly, test readers are giving up on the story before the interesting stuff happens, so the editor suggests "let's just put that cool fight scene in chapter 10 in the beginning so people know what the book is really about". That rarely works well

I've read all the sentences in all the paragraphs, but I'm still not sure what OP was trying to convey. Are they saying "skip the introduction"?

I try to start my presentations with a quick rundown of what the presentation will consist of. You can't always tailor the content to the audience, but you can at least give them an index/coles notes up front, so they know when to pay attention and when to zone out.

1. Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em.

2. Tell ‘em.

3. Tell ‘em what you told ‘em.

There should be 2 or 3 key points that you reinforce multiple times. No more.

And my #1 tip: The more natural you want the presentation to sound, the more you need to practice it in advance.

If you’re an experienced presenter you’ll know how and when to break these rules.

This is such bad advice because it leads to tedious contents pages that people read out twice. You shouldn't need to do more than tell people what problem you're trying to solve, and you definitely shouldn't need to tell people what you just told them. You just told them! If they don't know what you told them then you didn't do a very good job.

Seriously no good presentation I've ever seen has followed this tedious format.

Definitely agree about practice though. Makes a huge difference.

Also record yourself with a phone. Closest feeling you can get to a real audience.

The intro/outro is not an agenda, but a summary of the key things you want people to remember from your presentation.

Example:

1. Today I’m going to show you how I make gold from toilet paper. You can do this too, you just need 3 sheets of toilet paper.

2. I developed this process myself in a caravan in my front garden, blah blah blah. (Explain the process)

3. And that’s how you make gold from toilet paper. You can do this too - go and get your 3 sheets of toilet paper, and give it a go!

It may not be a great presentation, but people are more likely to come away from it remembering what you wanted them to remember because you made those points so clear. Great presentations do break these rules, but you’re more likely to be confusing than great.

Better to be dry and clear than attempt to be interesting while leaving your audience lost.

I don't think it is. It's a commonly taught technique to flight instructors and I personally think it does often work.

Not saying it applies in all situations.

I think it does depend on narrowly scoping the presentation.

> tell people what problem you're trying to solve

That's literally step one in OPs advice. It's just a pat way of conveying the "introduction > argument > summary" format for presenting and it scales really well from 3 slides to x.

1. This problem I'm trying to solve (i.e. I'm going to tell you how I solved this problem - Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em) 2. This is how I solved the problem (Tell 'em) 3. This is the outcome (i.e. This is what the solved problem looks like - Tell 'em what you told 'em)

>That's literally step one in OPs advice.

No, it's your generous, retroactive re-writing of the OP's advice. If you genuinely don't understand that you communicated something that wasn't in the original, then your communication skills are not at the level that justifies the confidence with which you're posting.

He was interpreting it generously, which is a pretty good way to keep discussions civil. The site guidelines say to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says", and I think that has happened pretty well here.

That ... doesn't apply when the topic at hand is the validity of oft-repeated conventional wisdom. In that case, the real anti-pattern to pretend that the conventional wisdom actually means a specific (sane) interpretation that lives only in one HN poster's head.[1]

Which, coincidentally, is the very thing I was criticizing.

It's really bizarre to see "be charitable in discussions" used to defend Orwellian reinterpretation of bad advice no one actually follows.

[1] See sanewashing https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sanewashing

Yes that's how the advice should be interpreted, but it is bad advice because it's not how it is actually interpreted. It fails to communicate a good idea.

Absolutely not. Please don't do this. Treat your audience as smart people and just tell them. All that pseudo-psychology just doesn't work with presentations.

Treat your audience as people with lots on their minds, distracted by their phones, and who are likely sitting in their 10th presentation so far this week. And be humble - your presentation is probably not as interesting as you think.

It's not pseudo-psychology, it's just common sense.

Imagine a 1h presentation consisting of three topics. If the listeners don't know how many topics you are going to cover, by minute 42 they will start zoning out, instead of looking forward to the next topic that sounded more interesting. By the end of the presentation they may also have forgotten about the first topic if the last topic was very engaging, even if the first key point was equally important as the third.

It doesn't have to be complicated, just a short agenda or table of contents in the beginning and a quick TLDR summary at the end. Of course you have to apply the technique with finesse, if you only have a short, single topic, it may be repetitive. For longer presentations with several key points it becomes more important.

If you practice too little, you'll screw up wording, miss important points, and sound nervous. If you practice too much, you'll sound robotic like you're reading a script word for word, which doesn't sound good unless you're an actor who's practiced reading scripts while still sounding natural. You have to find where the balance in the middle is, which depends on yourself, your content, and your audience.

Strong disagree - you can’t practise too much. Looking robotic comes from being nervous that you’ll forget it, because you haven’t practised enough.

Once you’ve delivered it 1000 times you’ll know it so well that it will appear more natural.

Really straightforward structure

1. Tell 'em.

My understanding of the key point of this blog is:

> Instead of explaining the technical background first so listeners understand the solution to a problem, start with the problem. Then explain the context/technical background second

They’ve invented the “motivation” of a text. Reinvented, obviously!

When I present, I just go through the introductory stuff at lightspeed. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I do? What is the history of this topic? Why should you care? All that takes about 30 seconds. If you aren't talking like Ben Shapiro for this bit, you're talking too slow.

Isn't this the PPT version of this movie trope?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

It’s used in some movies also, but the idea predates movies by millennia :)

Correct.

This technique really seemed to have been very popular in main stream cinema around 5 to 2 years ago, I think. So much so that my best buddy developed a kind of aversion to "3 hours earlier" etc. being displayed across the screen after the opening act.

No need to be snarky :)

No snark was present :)

I agreed with a lot of that except this:

> set some context and then present the problem to be solved

And this is exactly why:

> Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it

Addressing an audience of programmers is already like herding cats. Giving them a problem they can each individually try to solve instead of paying attention to the presentation is counter-productive.

If you absolutely have to tease the problem, consider doing it in the invitation to the presentation so that they can work through the problem before showing up.

For me the real nugget is the first comment:

"Programmers have a pavlovian engineering response. Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it."

Ah, Nerd Sniping: https://xkcd.com/356/

Isn't this just the STAR comms model?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...

Absolutely. Do this. I speak as a person with a long lifetime of public speaking behind me.

Also, do this if you have to write a memo or a paper. I very often swap, or repeat, the last paragraph to the beginning.

The best presentations, just like the best literature, tells a good story.

It takes character and personality to tell a good story. You can't lie to the audience. They will know right away if you are lying.

And lying in this case is okay as long as the story is good. Presentations should be about getting people to think and reflect, it should not be about what the author believes.

Slide one or two. Doesn't matter. Tell a story with a whole heart or don't try. Don't fake it. Give it all. Empty out or don't try.

In my opinion, Professor Patrick Winston's lecture (MIT) is likely in the top-5 when it come to advice on how to give presentations. I have used his framework multiple times, for both technical and business presentations in groups of a few to hundreds of people and have always had good results. Well worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

>>>> Now the first chapter starts with a gun pointed at the hero's head. By the end, he is teetering on a cliff about to jump into a crocodile-infested river. Just when the tension reaches a peak, we're introduced to the character but we have reason to want to get to know him.

Amusingly, every New Yorker article is structured in this way, but with a twist: The character and not the action is actually the main subject matter.

This very technique is why I loved Salman Khan's teaching videos on Khan Academy so much. On any topic, he goes straight to the content, no intro whatsoever.

Sally Bhai never misses a beat. Khan Academy has been a generational change for education

In other words, a ‘record scratch’ narrative structure https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/record-scratch-freeze-frame-y...

Some people argue that it's becoming the norm for youtube videos too. People start with in action introduction and later on intersperse background details with outcomes.

Government presentations are the worst, including the likes of NASA, NIH, etc. Extremely overcrowded slides, the logo of the institution on EVERY slide, equations all over the place, no care for providing value to the audience. This gave rise to the assertion-evidence style of presentions, which sound right on the surface but it has also been taken to another extreme where every slide tries to use the approach. My single concern for my presentations is to provide value to the audience; this usually fixes a lot of stupid presentation content...

More generally, you should view presentations as stories. Obviously not stories presented solely for their drama as one might watch a movie, but the fundamental "conflict -> tension raising -> resolution" cycle ought to be in your presentation, multiple times as needed just as they nest within a traditional story.

It is tempting to the technical mind to present them as we see mathematical proofs, building from the fundamentals up to the final result in a completely-temporally-ordered manner, but the reasons that works in a math text don't apply to presentations. And a lot of people don't find it all that useful in math texts intended for learning either, if you read one of HN's periodic discussions of "how we learn math best".

This post is basically to use the "start with a hook" approach to story telling, which is a good option. There are others, but there's a reason so many good stories-for-the-sake-of-stories use this approach. In general if people are showing up to your presentation voluntarily, you do have a couple of slides you can use to build some tension up before they'll zone out on you, but you do want to get to your first "conflict" fairly quickly.

This is pretty abstract, so let me give a specific technical example to show what I mean. It's been a while now since pretty much everyone knows git, but for a while I was the de facto git trainer in my company. I had a prepared presentation I used for this, and I had the people in the presentation follow along, running commands in a local repo they create on the spot. I did not immediately start with a hook; I did start with general overview of git and how it works, but on what would be the fourth slide or so, rather than take them through nothing but the happy path, I start getting them into trouble, detaching the head. Everyone detaches head sooner or later without meaning to. This is the conflict & tension, and the resolution is, how do we solve this problem? The rest of the presentation does not just guide through the happy paths, but periodically either gets them into one of the common error states or walks them through a common pitfall by not just warning them about it, but taking them through the process of getting into various common troubles and then getting out of it.

Each of these cycles is an implicit story, where the main character gets into trouble, as appropriate the trouble gets worse, then the trouble is resolved. Obviously no one would go to a movie theater to watch someone get stuck in git and then get unstuck; it is not that kind of story. Programming and hacking get dressed up the way they do by Hollywood for a reason; the real thing is unwatchably boring. But it still has the story cycle in it. You can also spice you presentations up by showing some of the wrong paths you encountered or the problems you had to solve instead of just presenting the bare results; in addition to being more compelling in the abstract, such presentations are more valuable anyhow in a lot of other ways.

This is far more effective then a standard dead presentation that just shows "how to do this. how to do that. how to do the other thing. now you know things go forth and do" while the audience's eyes glaze over.

As the article mentions, this is also used by authors. I went to a book signing for Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of House of Leaves and he mentioned that for his books, he always ends up throwing out the beginning of the book.

SCQA - https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/executive-communicati...

i'd go further: instead of slides, start with a demo. if the demo is compelling enough then people will want to hear how it works

compare the popularity of twitch streamers with recorded wwdc talks

Related: Millennial Pause https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EVHLBdZ6Oxw

In that case, is the "first slide" even that important?

it's not that it's not important, it's just not that engaging.

Most of the time there's a minute or two where the first slide is up but everyone is still getting settled. The less engaging info can be on that first slide and when the talk starts you can skip ahead to the second slide without discussing that first one.

So basically: in medias res

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

Yes, the subtitle of the article is "AKA in media res"

Like in video games: Show the door before the key.

Maybe a good way to trim off unnecessary context but for presentations I’ve done on concepts novel to the audience, the context is critical for understanding. Skipping to some meat then giving context just produces more confusion. I much prefer leading with “why does my audience care”.

They don’t care about context - but I like literally saying “you should care about this because X” or “after this presentation you will be able to do Y”. That engages people and focuses your presentation on the lens of audience’s needs rather than yours. Then context is reasonable as they’re hooked and want to know where you’re going.

If you want to waist some time start your presentation with a table of content. Then explain the CV of your coworkers, yourself and everyone involved. Also don’t forget to mention the history of your company and all the stuff your company is doing besides what you’re presentation is about. In the end make a summary, thank your mom and dad and mention that your company is hiring.

The first slide is the book cover. Guess what, people do judge a book by it's cover.

Wadsworth constant. (Older Reddit meme) Skip (30%) to the good part!

It's very true. When watching programming talks on YouTube, I often hover the mouse over the time bar to find the first preview which looks like the slide has syntax highlighted code on it. I'm here for the cool coding stuff, not the preamble!

Rule of thumb for Youtube videos is to hit 3 to get to where the video actually starts.

Obviously not meant to be taken literally, but surprisingly often could be.

Presenting is hard. Know your audience.

Some need an introduction. Others might not.

similar to Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto (McKinsey)

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