Effective Presentation Writing and Delivering

March 25th, 2013

I have been speaking at, attending and organizing conferences for the last 7 years. I have enough to say about this topic to write a book, so I'll stick with an overview and let you fill in the details with your creativity. This post focuses on presentations in the IT world.

Planning is often overlooked, whether you write software, blog posts, books or presentations. I started this post by making a list of things to say, rearranging the items and removing less important ones to make the whole thing short. For presentations, I cut my production time from 40 hours to only 20 hours by planning with mind maps. That's because you spend time on content rather than form. By all means, do plan before you open your presentation software.

I once attended an incredible workshop where the speaker only used 6 slides in 6 hours. Don't assume that your audience has a dog's attention span or that they can't understand what you say without visual support. People are smart, so treat them as such. Five words per slide is great, but when you end up flicking every 20 seconds to compensate, the audience gets distracted. A little faster and they may get seizures. If you're going to say it anyway, why write it on your slides? Slides are for showing things that cannot be communicated effectively in words.

Avoid writing code on slides when you can, use short snippets otherwise. I recommend using images and diagrams rather than text whenever possible. Just don't pick overly abstract pictures as that is also distracting. Here's an example to show device compatibility that is both more effective and more appealing than a bullet-point. Create a separate deck of slides for publishing online as a reference, if you must.

When you begin speaking, introduce yourself and why people should listen to your advice. Position yourself as an expert on the topic. Don't spend more than a minute on that. Then, instead of a table of contents, tell your audience what to expect, and what not to expect. Example:

"I will give you a general understanding of how to profile queries, how to pick good indexes, how to write better queries and give you a checklist to try against your current projects."

I strongly recommend splitting your talks into self-contained chapters. Each break allows for questions from the audience, making your talks a lot more interactive. Chapters also make your talks easier to follow, as opposed to talks where every concept is built on top of a previous concept, and everything could collapse should an attendee misunderstand an element along the journey.

If find that stories and metaphors are very effective communication tools. Use them as much as possible. People come to you for your experience, not to hear something that they can read in a manual.

This concludes my brief list of ideas to improve your presentations. Try out a few of them that you find interesting. Don't use the ones that you don't like.

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