How to Give a Good Talk
blog.sigplan.org
blog.sigplan.org
- Yes, tell me who you are, and why i should listen to you. But keep it to 1 slide, and 1 minute. I shouldn't be able to walk away and come back literal 5 minutes later and have you still yammering about yourself. especially for a 15 minute lightening talk.
- Your talk title should be the agenda. I do NOT need a slide by slide table of contents for your talk, or you reading out the table of contents.
- Accents, even heavy ones, aren't much of a problem. Looking anxious isn't a problem, i feel you there. However, You mumbling is. Being overly monotone is. Looking bored yourself doesn't help. People are there because they _know_ you have something their interested to say, you can be confident that people will listen.
- Get to the point. Seriously. I shouldn't be able to scrub ahead 10+ minutes and not have you talking about the topic at hand. Please don't explain the basics, like what a web browser is, when your audience is a web dev conference.
-Cut the fluff. Especially if you're adhd or other neuro diverse, you need to work to stay on topic. It _might_ help if you write a script, and have someone go through and mark anything off topic. Even if you don't use the script on stage, writing it and having it might anchor you to the topic at hand.
You don't need to be perfect on stage. We'll all forgive a lot that happens in a talk. We've all experienced the wrath of the demo gods. We get it, you're cool. BUT only if you're actually giving your talk. Note that most of my complaints circle around not actually giving your talk while you're on stage.
This one depends. I agree with you probably 4 out of 5 times it happens, but that other 20% are probably some of the best, most memorable talks.
Do you have any examples you could link to, or were they all live events?
If you look at the single slide that all of this is sparked by, you can see that these are just (amazing) rants. He's telling the story of Illumos, and that reminds him of the pure evil of Oracle and the meaning of life, and he keeps letting himself drift from the topic to savor those points over and over. He is very quirky, and thinks about things in very quirky ways, and he's just letting the whole audience enjoy that for a bit.
That's why this is such a great illustration of OP's point.
I strongly disagree. I stopped watching Chrome DevTools update videos a few years back because I have difficulty understanding the presenter:
I can understand her if I'm try hard, but I think that listening to a speaker shouldn't require active effort in order to understand them.
I guess I'm used to those accents though.
I wouldn't have brought this up but I recently ran into an auto translated youtube video. I have my youtube set to Japanese. I watched a presentation I know was in English but Youtube presented it with Japanese voices. I didn't actually want that and couldn't find how to turn it off but I was still impressed. So maybe that can add dialets so you can choose California English and someone else can choose Singlish and someone else can choose Scotish English, etc...
Each of those can be fixed with practice. You don’t need notes or a script, you just need appropriate practice. There are proven methods, many opportunities to practice them and even more people who will help. Most importantly though, it’s okay to screw up when you’re nervous and each of these donts is totally fine. They’re things to work on and reasons to keep practicing with reasonable, skilled speakers.
Practice can and should be done before giving the presentation to the public. You should record yourself and watch it back.
If you consider practice to just be giving presentations in front of people at a conference, I'm sorry, but no. For example, if you want general practice: seek out your local Toastmasters.
> Your donts are all about nervous people lacking experience.
They aren't. Many of them has nothing to do with lacking experience.
> You don't need notes or a script,
Technically, no, but that's like saying you technically don't need a windshield on a car, or doors, or numerous other things. I have no issue getting up and giving a presentation, and I still use notes.
> Most importantly though, it's okay to screw up when you're nervous and each of these donts is totally fine.
It depends on the context. I'm sorry, but using a conference as your means of practicing is not considerate. People spent money to be there. Often thousands in tickets, travel, and hotels. Speakers frequently get compensated as well. So no, it's not totally fine.
At a local meetup which is usually free? Sure. At some presentation you give at work? Great. There are numerous other ways to get practice, but the context of this thread is conference talks.
As someone who has helped people become speakers at conferences and colleges, I think rather than babying them, it's important to provide clear and actionable guidance.
Also, it's more than reasonable to expect someone to rehearse, but I don't think there is any substitute for the real thing. It's like the saying about testing... everyone tests in prod, just some people try test before that too.
Flights, hotels, and tickets are all compensation and what I was referring to. These conferences are all open to newer speakers.
> Also, it's more than reasonable to expect someone to rehearse,
Apparently not, judging by comments.
> but I don't think there is any substitute for the real thing.
But you don't need to go from not speaking to speaking at a conference. There are many other steps in between where you can get experience in public speaking.
Especially inexperienced speakers should prepare notes or script to give it a structure and transmission from topic to topic.
Else one quickly ends up with a talk like "uh, now what's on this slide, oh, yeah" which takes out any flow and doesn't present a good flow of thought.
How much those notes are used and how much one can deviate makes the expert. But the better talks are well prepared.
You need to know what you want to talk about. What the key points are.
Yes. Focus on giving a talk of value, and reasonably engaging, but don't be afraid to be humble and authentic, and don't try to be a TED-grade smooth salesperson.
See my TED talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=onion+talks
https://jmmv.dev/2020/07/presentation-tips.html
https://jmmv.dev/2020/07/presentation-preparation.html
(These were originally Twitter threads so apologies for the abuse of emojis hehe.)
I used to dread speaking in public but have come to enjoy it, and all of the above tips have made it easier over time. I think the vast majority of them came to me from more experienced presenters (and even a class I took in college about public speaking).
As others have mentioned in the discussion below, keeping it fun and providing the motivation for the talk are important. And my pet peeve is to remind people that “your slides are not the presentation: what you say is”.
my most stressful talks were the times i was early in my career and i had to present the results from some analysis or experiment that i knew was kind of weak or relied on some iffy assumptions. i felt like i had to blow everybody away and i was always dreading some sharp-eyed audience member asking a pointed question that would make the whole thing blow up. my imposter syndrome didn't help, but i felt like i was some sort of slick salesman that had a pull a con and then sneak out without getting caught.
instead, be willing to say i don't know. be upfront with things that make you uneasy. it disarms your sharpest critics and makes it less about an antagonistic you-vs-the-audience and turns it into more of a collaborative you-working-with-the-audience.
This is so true. It's a lemma to the famous quote "Always tell the truth; it's the easiest thing to remember." [0]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7711.David_Mamet
I'm just going to drop a quick tip that might be helpful to people with severe anxiety around public speaking: beta blockers (specifically propranolol.) Even when prepared and knowledgeable, and in a small group setting, I often found my leg shaking uncontrollably, and my throat locking up on me, leading to stammering, etc. Beta blockers effectively managed these involuntary symptoms, which also improved my confidence, and vastly improved my presentations, without sedating effects.
In a certain sense, public speaking is no different than those situation. Even better, the people you're in front of you don't really care about, where as you do care about your family and friends. In other words, it should be that embarrassing yourself in front of friends and family "should" be the worse thing since you will have to face them again where as you won't have to face these strangers you're speaking in front of.
And yet, even though I've given ~10 public talks I still feel those butterflies, at least until the talk actually starts. Once it starts, for me, they go away. That assumes I know my topic. I'd say a best person talk at a wedding is more nerve wracking, for me, than a talk about anything I'm working on. I can talk about what I'm working on easily because I know it inside and out. Sure I need to practice my talk but if someone came up to me in a hall and asked me about my work I could talk their ear off with no practice. Conversely, the wedding talk topic is not a topic I know inside and out, hence it's harder, at least for me.
I know it was certainly nerve racking the first time I had to give a public talk at school. I wonder if the teacher had asked in private, something like
Teacher: Are you nervous about your talk?
Student: Super nervous
Teacher: Do you have a favorite video game?
Student: Yea, Minecraft
Teacher: What do you love about it.
Student: (with teach prompting, goes on for 5-10 minutes what things they love about Minecraft, things they made, experiences they had...)
Teacher: You just gave a public talk to an audience of 1. Just organize and practice a little and you'll do great!
I don't know if that would help but I'd like to think it would.
They're not going to, for example, start harassing you online just because at some point during your presentation you said the word "blacklist" (or other words that are nowadays are considered worse than they were back then).
So I'd say part of the reason of why it's easy with family/friends but stressful with strangers, is subconscious fear of this kind of judgement where you don't know how this large amount of people will react, and fear that something you say or something you do will cause a response way more negative than you expect. Sure, you can imagine some possible negative responses, but because you don't know them personally, you don't know what's their "upper bound" for a negative response (how far they will go).
And once you start talking the nerves go away because, once you start, running away suddenly becomes a worse choice (easier to get a negative response) compared to finishing the talk.
That would be my guess.
[1]: Some might cross lines, but those should be the exception, and you probably wouldn't be relaxed with them anyway.
It's the best of its kind that I've seen. An hour long and I've watched it several times. Even my highschooler was impressed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY
EDIT: no way, it was just posted yesterday. Glad it got the attention.
BUT (and it's a big but), it adds a second axis of subjectvity. Already, I'm out there talking about a thing which I think is "interesting" and "worthy" subject matter of other peoples time. Now, I'm adding "and is delivered in an entertaining way".
For me - that's humour - both in the delivery, and in the slides I show. But - like anything - it doesn't always land.
And, when it doesn't -- it's a very very long awkward talk. I've been on speaking circuts where a conference goes to multiple cities (same country), and the talk went down very well in one city, and bombed in another. Things like timing matter (after lunch sucks).
Also, The author lists the requirements as "inform, educate and entertain" -- and I'd add -- "in that order". I've cut things from my talk because they were funny (IMO), but ultimately didn't support the content of the talk enough. After all -- This is a tech talk, not a standup routine.
All three are very hard to do well -- but I do agree with the author in that's it's the speakers job to do all three.
It is very important though. It's very easy to lose an audience, and the truth is a lot of the speakers before you will likely range from slightly boring to extremely boring. The audience can be primed to totally clock out if you don't grab them immediately and keep them for the whole thing.
If you want to keep people's attention, make every slide as minimally simple as possible. Like one diagram and maybe a few words. Listing out bullet points of full sentences might feel efficient but it's no better than just saying what you would have written. And lots of text is a lot more glaze-inducing for most of the audience. You can point to supplementary docs for detail.
Another idea is to break up longer talks (30min+) in two with some slides of nice photos you've taken.
If you want to have something for attendees to refer back to after the talk, a complementary blog/whitepaper is a better idea than putting all your details in the talk slides
Humour can work in presentations but it's really hard to pull off well. A lot of jokes rely on things like shared background/experience/cultural touchstones, so tricky to do in a conference where you might not know those things about your audience.
If you do use humour, I'd recommend not making it core to the talk, so if people don't get the jokes, it doesn't ruin the talk for them. Also generally use it sparingly, the odd meme can be funny, one on every slide probably not a great idea.
https://github.com/ciberado/100-trucos-para-hacer-mejores-pr...
I will be grateful if you help me to enrich it by opening Issues or creating PRs.
Must is a strong word. Surely there exist good presentations that begin with something else.
Hard disagree.
It is easy to imagine a problem that just sounds FUN.
If you can't show me why it's fun, or why it's relevant in some other way, then I'm out. (And you don't have very long to do it, either...)
[Edit to reply to tikhonj, because I'm rate limited: The "value proposition" is what makes it valuable to the listener. Why should they give you their attention and time? Value is "anything that makes people interested in what you're telling them", as opposed to all the things that don't make them interested. Since the "don't make them interested" set is not empty (far from it!), then no, it's not a tautology.]
So describing a fun problem is implicitly telling the audience why they should listen.
https://ia800308.us.archive.org/32/items/pdfy-tG1MuMpwvrML6Q...
https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Optimal_Tip-to-Tip_Ef...
These rules are not, "Skip one and you'll lose the whole audience."
They are, "Do this and you'll grab an optimum amount of attention and retention."
Just my internal guts feeling that probably is wrong.
1. Picture the problem
2. Promise the potential
3. Prove the performance
4. Push the purchase
Although focused on "pitches," all talks/presentations are "selling" an idea. (Including that article itself!)
I have seen good speakers with fluff content and terrible speakers with useful content. At this point, as long as the quality of the content shows and is discernable, I don't mind bad but sincere speakers. I even kind of like it...
I would highly recommend the video. It's not really fair to compare them, because TFA here is short and sweet, but I got a lot more out of the video.
Step 2. Doesn't matter
This applies not only to giving a good talk but living a good life. Unless you were born beautiful - step 1 takes 10-20 years of conscious effort to develop. Everything else is marketing/advertising, otherwise known as lies (99% of what's on HN, for example)