Slashdot Mirror
Dirty Tricks of Presentors
A reader writes "Perl expert Mark Jason Dominus gave a great talk last month in St. Louis on how to give a good conference presentation.
There's nothing specific to Perl, and a lot of people
said they thought it was the most useful talk at the conference even though they didn't think they'd be doing a conference presenation any time soon. Mark also wrote up some notes
that explain the parts he forgot to put on the slides."
Since the forum usually provides the Google cache or mirroring functionality themselves, I think it would be prudent to make these improvements to Slashdot/Slashcode. Volunteers?
Before it starts he says "How many people have taken $OTHER_TUTORIAL_NAME I gave last year?" .... to those who raise their hands he says "Well, you should go find something else to do, because $THIS_TUTORIAL is the same as $OTHER_TUTORIAL, only the name has changed"
Never mind that by the time these people get back to registration, find another tutorial they want to see, exchange their materials, and get to the new tutorial, they'll have missed a good chunk of the "replacement" tutorial which they paid good money for. Nevermind those folks who don't want to do some-other-tutorial, so now they're completely out the money and have to try and fight the conference organizer to get their money back.
Dominus is the last person who should be giving pointers on presenting. He's the only person on my list of presenters for whom "Hell will freeze over, Satan will ice-skate to work, before I go see him speak".
Jeez, first off, that presentation SUCKS. Second, put the fucking presentation somewhere so that you can download the freaking html so that I could have barfed all over it while reading it in real-time, rather than having to wait 5 fucking minutes before each fucking slide would load. Learn how to use squid as a reverse proxy, for god's sakes - it will save your ass from a slashdotting, especially for such a trivial amount of content to display.
Second, put all of your fucking points on a slide - don't make me click through 5 fucking html pages just so that I can read the contents of one pathetic slide.
According to the slide notes, there are 43 slides in that presentation, which I presume took 45 minutes. That means about 1 slide per minute - wow! A good idea for real presentations: If you're doing 45 minutes, have NO MORE THAN 13 SLIDES. Rule of thumb: expect each slide to take about 5 minutes to talk to. Anything less than that and you're boring your audience, because you're (a) reading your slides instead of talking to the crowd, which is BORING, or (b) you're spending too much time at the podium clicking your fucking mouse. The more time you spend behind the podium, the choppier your presentation is, and more bored your audience gets. I'd prefer 10 slides for a 45 minute talk, because then you have some time for Q&A, but 13 is doable, because you go faster over your title slide, intro slide, and thank you slide.
If this guy is winning "best presenter" awards, then I shudder at how low the standards have become.
I could have wanted more "physical appearence" tricks, but it seems to deal mostly with putting slides together. If you are making presentations often, you (hopefully) are aware of how you react in such situations, but if you, like me, give perhaps one presentation every third year you might find these few tricks handy. I know they work for me.