⇥ On writing talks

After giving my “PHP and the Taste of Mayo” keynote presentation this morning at the Dutch PHP Conference, I have been approached by a few people who complimented me on my presentation style (perhaps they were just being nice), and a couple actually asked me how I went about preparing my talk, so I thought I’d write up a few random comments on my blog.

First of all, preparing a keynote is a very torturous process for me—which is why I normally avoid public speaking like the plague. I start working on my presentations as soon as I know about them, but I don’t write down any slides until the very end. The reason for this is very simple: I have to work my way backwards from the end.

The two most important aspects of a talk are the message and the presentation. Whenever I write a talk (or an article), I try to first start by deciding on a few key points that I want to drive home. In my experience, it’s unrealistic to expect an attendee to absorb every single slide, which means that, as a speaker, you should make it your goal to ensure that everyone takes home at least one or two key concepts. This means that you are going to have to repeat yourself—and you will have to do it in such a way that doesn’t sound like you’re repeating yourself.

When I finally do start preparing my slides, I aim for a very particular style—I want the slides to act as a visual aid to my voice, and not the other way around. Too many speakers seem to work their slides the other way around and end up preparing slides chock full of bulletpoints and text. This makes the speaker a slave to the slides—and this means that both the speaker and the attendees will have to split their attention between the screen and the voice commentary.

In writing my slides, I try to create a good balance between serious concepts and funny remarks. Of course, funny is often in the eye of the beholder, and I am not that good at deliverying jokes, so I try to keep the humour lights and fairly obvious—I just want one more tool to keep peoples’ eyes peeled to the screen, and not to their e-mail inboxes.

Right before a talk, I will also do what I call a “timing” of the slides—I just go through them and point out the key elements that I want to explain during my talk. At this stage, I aim for a run time of around 2/3 the period allocated for my talk (e.g.: 30 minutes for a 45-minute talk). The main reason for this is that, on the stage, I tend to speak more slowly, and that, no matter how many times I’ve spoken before, I am always nervous when I’m front of a large audience, and therefore I need more time to present my concepts. This usually works out pretty well for me—this morning, for example, I did my presentation in 48 minutes out of the allocated 45.

During my timing run, I have also developed a simple test to tell whether I’ve written good slides: I pretend that I have a large screen behind my back, and I consciously count the number of times that I would need to turn to point at something on a slide. If my slides are being a good visual aid to my presentation, that should happen a very small number of times.

Finally, when presenting, I really like to walk around the stage; this makes it possible to keep the audience focused on a moving object, which keeps their attention going. If I’ve done things right and the slides are supporting my talk (as opposed to the other way around), moving around gives me an opportunity to use the visual aids a straight man to a number of visual gags to keep people entertained. I also make a conscious effort to vary the tone of my voice, rather than droning on (which is all too easy a trap to fall into when you’re not speaking in your own language), to keep people involved.

At the conclusion of a talk, I always offer the audience what I think are two or three important concepts that I believe they should take away from my talk, as well as a challenge to comment on what I said on my blog, their blogs, or any other relevant online forum. I used to take questions, but, these days, it’s much more productive to give people an opportunity to create a real dialogue online instead.

So there you have it—this is how I prepare my talks. How do you prepare yours? What do you think I could improve?