One step to a perfect presentation

October 5th, 2008 in Career

#1 piece of advice for all presenters: know your presentation by heart.

I’ve been to four different conferences in the past three
weeks. I’ve seen a lot of presentations – a few good and many that could use some help. All the presentations I saw could be fixed with one best practice:

Know how to tell your story without your slides. 

I recommend writing your talk first. Practice it. Then
figure out what the major points are. Practice again with just one main point
on a slide. Then fill out your slides. Then practice again without slides. Your
presentation will be a 100% better, you’ll survive computer failures and you
won’t commit many errors like looking at your slides, reading your slides,  … or the worst, not being able to give your presentation when the projector or your computer won’t work.

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3 Responses to “One step to a perfect presentation”

  1. Sankarshan says:
    October 5, 2008 at 7:05 pm

    The number of presentations that have come crashing down because all the speaker had to say was on the slides is amazing. And, yet story telling is supposed to be a natural art. In any story there are supposed to be anchor points and narration weaves those points into a ‘presentation’. I don’t know for sure, but a large part of speaker-choke-due-to-faulty-projector is perhaps based on an over-loading of the term ‘presentation’ and psyching themselves out.

    Reply
  2. Mårten Woxberg says:
    October 5, 2008 at 11:55 pm

    Take a look at what this guy has to say.
    He’s no Steve Jobs but it doesn’t make it wrong…
    http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_s_rose_on_pitching_to_vcs.html

    Reply
  3. Pablo Rodríguez says:
    October 6, 2008 at 11:50 pm

    An excellent presentation on presentation style can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/ethos3/storytelling-101 (audio sync is not perfect, but it’s fine).

    Reply