⇥ Some tips for great presentations

What's in your slides?

There are far too many articles on the Net that purport to give their readers practical suggestions on writing good slide decks for presentations. By and far, I find that most of these articles hit far off the mark—for the simple reason that there isn’t “one true way” when it comes to writing compelling presentations and, therefore, no amount of “tips” or checklists will help you unless you have a clear understanding of the big picture: presenting is a holistic experience, and it should be treated as such.

This is not to say, however, that there aren’t good ways to improve your decks and your presentation skills—you just need to start from the beginning instead of jumping into the middle of the story. Here are some of the notes that I have accumulated over the years:

0. Find your groove

The first rule of writing a good deck is to… completely ignore your deck and focus, instead, on your presentation. If you are thinking that your presentation is, in fact, your deck, you have just uncovered the first cardinal mistake of writing a presentation!

A compelling presentation works because it is delivered by you—not your slides. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is focus on having something useful, important, intriguing and challenging to say. You should be able to deliver just as good a speech without the help of slides.

My personal philosophy is that a keynote should never answer questions—that’s what tutorials are for. A good talk works by planting doubts and raising challenges in the mind of the audience: you want the people who listen to you to leave the room with more questions than they came in with—you want them to go home and do something because of what you say.

Therefore, when I present a talk I always start by deciding what kind of trouble I want to cause. I pick one or two principal theses that I want to prove and focus all my efforts on figuring out how I can prove them to the audience. I don’t even start worrying about slides until a few days before I am supposed to give the talk.

As an added bonus to this approach, you will be able to deliver your talk without slides—projectors break, the power does, occasionally, go out and it’s not that unusual to forget that all-important video adaptor for your Mac. Therefore, it’s always good to know that, in a pinch, you can get it done without the deck.

Remember, no amount of design, graphics and special effects are going to make up for a crappy talk. Focus on what you want to say first, and make it pretty afterwards.

1. Remember that you are the speaker

This brings me to another important point: your slide deck should not be a crutch. Remember that you are the speaker, not your slides. Therefore, the slides should follow the flow of your presentation—not the other way around.

This may seem obvious, but, once you start examining the way most speakers present, you’ll see that it isn’t. When a speaker needs to constantly pause in between slides, he or she is using his deck as a crutch—the talk cannot continue until the next slide is ready for him or her to lean over. Similarly, when a speaker needs to point at his or her slides or read from them all the time, he or she is playing to the deck, and not the other way around.

When I prepare a presentation, once I have written my deck I practice presenting with my back to the screen. By the time I go on stage, I expect to be able to deliver my presentation as one fluid speech, with the slides switching behind my back in order to keep up with what I’m saying—the deck is my slave, and not the other way around. This means learning to account for the inevitable lag between the time you click the button on your remote and the deck advances to the next slide so that you don’t have to pause and wait for the right screen to show up—and the only way you can do that is through lots of rehearsals.

2. People come to see you, not your slides

The reason why slides that are chock-full of text are “bad” is that they take away from the number one reason why people come to see your talk: you.

If that sounds presumptuous, well… that’s what public speaking is: the belief that you have something important to say that other people will want to hear. If your guests are busy reading your slides, they are not busy listening to you. If they are interested in the topic but they didn’t want to listen to you, they’d buy a book. Get it? It’s about you. Not your slides, you. Slides: bad. You: good.

If your slides overflow with text because you’re worried that there might not be enough material to make them meaningful for offline viewing, I’d say that either (a) you need to write a companion paper or (b) you need to tell people that they should have been there to see you in order to understand your deck (pro tip: option (a) makes you sound much less like Cher’s current replicant died before they could get it to the cloning machine and now you’re channeling her spirit).

By the same token, the most important characteristic of your talk is confidence. Remember, whether you like to admit it or not, you are putting on a show. People who are entertained are more likely to pay attention to what you say and be receptive to your theses. This is not to say that you need to put on a full hour of standup comedy—but rather than droning on for an hour is not a good idea unless you’re speaking at a suicide-pact conference and the organizers have already handed out the razor blades.

Confidence comes primarily from—you guessed it—rehearsal and preparation. If you’re well prepared, you will naturally know what to say and when. If you’ve practiced, you’ll know which jokes fall flat, where you’re supposed to be in your presentation at any given point in time, and so on. Most importantly, you’ll be able to focus on your delivery rather than on your slides—adapting to how receptive the audience is to your talk and altering your speech accordingly.

3. There are no nails under your shoes, and you’re not drunk

The other stupendously bad piece of advice that I see repeated over and over is that you should deliver your presentation in a stationary position. That’s idiotic; I am a wanderer, and unashamedly so—and so are many excellent speakers I know. In fact, I will usually pace around the stage with a glass in my hand and the remote in the other (replacing the glass with a microphone if I don’t happen to be wearing a lapel mike). The way I see it, you should do what comes natural to you… because it will look natural.

What you should avoid at all costs is to “wobble”—stand stationary but continuously shift your weight from one leg to the other. It makes you look unsure of yourself, shifty (pardon the pun) and untrustworthy. If you can’t stand still and don’t want to move around, lean against a prop—a lectern works well for two things: holding your laptop and holding your weight. Better yet, walk around if the stage permits it.

4. Be an honest speaker

There is nothing that irks me more than a speaker who does not make a honest presentation. By honesty, here, I don’t mean that the speaker is necessarily right, just that he or she is telling the truth.

The difference is very important, because honesty is a very powerful tool to make your audience believe you. Thus, I dislike when I see someone demoing a product of any kind by using a highly-polished set of steps with a predictable outcome—they’re saying “hey, I had two months to prepare these twenty lines of code, but now I’m going to pretend that you can write them in 45 minutes!”

People are not that easily played. When Cal and I gave our Flex tutorials at CodeWorks this past fall, we went into our presentations armed with a general idea of what we wanted to show the audience (in this case, how to build a Twitter client with AIR) and our knowledge of Flex. Live coding without a pre-defined structure allowed us to engage the audience and give them a realistic impression of what coding with Flex Builder is really like. The inevitable occasional mistake (it’s surprisingly difficult to think, speak and type coherently at the same time), as well as the unexpected questions from the audience that we had to research on Google right there and then, served to reinforce the honesty of the message that we wanted to convey. Experts are not walking encyclopedias or manuals—they just know where to look for the things they haven’t figured out yet and, most of all, they are not afraid to be wrong.

5. Break your rules from time to time

Rules exist to be broken—and can be broken to much effect. My presentations tend to be extremely minimalistic in nature, but I will occasionally throw in an elaborate slide or two when I think that doing so will help my presentation.

It’s a gut call, but like everything else, presentations that rigidly follow a set of rules—whatever those rules might be—end up being formulaic. A bit of variety now and then can be a good thing.

There are also some instances when the rules of the game simply change. For example, my slides tend to be extremely simple—my presentation at Enterprise LAMP Camp in Nashville had a grand total of 25 words in 30 slides—but only when I give presentations in person. If I am writing a presentation for something like a webcast, where all people have to contend with is my voice, I will make my slides much heavier in textual content, since I want my audience to have something to follow while I speak.

Incidentally, while we are on the subject of remote presentations, I’d like to pass along a really useful tip: as Dale Carnegie used to say, your expression carries in your voice. If you smile while you’re speaking, the people at the other end of the conversation will know—and, similarly, if your expression remains the same throughout your presentation, your audience will perceive you as droning. The best way to make sure that you do vary your tone of voice throughout your talk is to turn on your webcam—most laptops come with one these days anyway—and place the resulting image at the bottom of the screen while you’re presenting. This will give you an “audience” of sort and is almost guaranteed to improve the tone of your voice—that is, if you can stomach looking at yourself talk for an hour at a time.

Photo credit: the php|a gang, from php|works 2008 in Atlanta (this is what happens when you weasel out of helping at a conference in my company).