One step to a perfect presentation

#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.

3 Replies to “One step to a perfect presentation”

  1. 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.

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