For god’s sake - just email it to me. I’ll read it myself.

So I’ve long been aware of the need to keep people awake and engaged when presenting. Academic conferences, Musicians Union Seminars, music industry events, guest lectures at other universities… These days, I’m averaging a public talk somewhere other than my classes at BCU about once a week - and the places I’m being invited to do those presentations are getting more and more interesting.

This week, Wrexham. Next week, Leeuwarden. Then Oslo followed by Shanghai.

I’ve been more your Lessig/Kawasaki method presenter for some time (essentially large white text on a black background, no more than 3 words per slide) for quite some time now. I tend to use fewer words, and more slides than most people.

But my theory is that the slides are not the presentation. I’d prefer to make eye contact with the audience - and images, like long sections of text, are hard to compete with. Usually what goes on the screen is the subheading of ‘what I’m talking about now’.

It serves as a memory aid for me (oh, that’s right, now I’m going to talk about Distributed Identity - I have some things to say about that…), it keeps the topic within sight while I improvise, and it reminds the audience of what I’m talking about, should they happen to drift off.

But sometimes I mix it up.

What were probably my two most well-received presentations were quite different from each other. One had 250-odd slides in 15 minutes, pulling out keywords from a completely scripted speech and - for fun - occasionally using a different word than the one I spoke (eg. ‘liars’ when I said the word ‘lawyers’ - or ‘charlatans’ when I said the word ‘experts’). There’s little room for error with this method and it’s not for the faint-hearted. You need a wireless clicker too.

The other one was for a dead serious academic conference I presented at in Amsterdam. Rather than create my slides in Powerpoint, I had them all drawn on paper in crayon, then scanned. I was, at least, notable as contrast.

But as you point out, Stef, the keys are good narrative structure, engaging the audience where they’re at, and remembering that Powerpoint is specially designed to help you give bad presentations. You have to avoid all of the things it’s trying to encourage you to do.

Thanks for the great article - I might try an all-image presentation at the next one in tribute.

I notice you used a linear approach to planning your presentation, which makes me think that unconsciously or otherwise you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted to say before you started. As an alternative to writing a linear set of headings first, many people find mind maps useful to distill their thoughts at this stage:

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_01.htm

(I have nothing to do with the company)

Once you’ve got the big picture down on paper, it’s very easy then to mark it up in sections and number them in the order in which you’re going to cover them.

In fact, if you’re really up against time, you can use the mind map as your notes for the talk.

This is a great right up of how to do a presentation. All feedback from students was very positive and all found you very engaging - so thank you again. I will take the liberty of passing on this posting to them as I think it will prove a really useful tool when they come to present their ideas. Actually I have to mark 120 presentations from another set of students and I think this may prove a useful resource, if they’re not going to all be endless bullet points!

I think from the sounds of things you took the absoulute right approach. In my research (entrepreneurship in the creative industries) I always use a narrative methodology and there is much evidence to suggest that stories help folks make sense of and understand the ‘real-lived’ experience of the entrepreneur.

Thanks again

Charlotte

I’ve seen this done in events with a whole bunch of speakers to get through and it’s very effective at forcing people to get to their various points!

I think combining that with your approach of slides comprised almost entirely of images would be a delightfully-respectful way to be presented to

But how often do you turn up and there’s an opportunity to swap for your own laptop or to do something non-standard. Rarely. In the past I’ve made presentations in Flash and turned them into EXEs which works but Flash isn’t much fun for complicated tasks.

I’m sure that list will be useful!

@Simon - You know, I’m similar. For some reason my body always decides to wake me up far too early of the morning I’m doing anything the least bit stressful so that I’m not rested in any way for them - perhaps that fight or flight instinct making us sharper? Oddly, the more people I present to the more abandon I seem to show about what they think about it… not sure how that works!