{"id":2314,"date":"2013-03-26T11:11:08","date_gmt":"2013-03-26T18:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=2314"},"modified":"2013-03-26T11:11:08","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T18:11:08","slug":"an-open-letter-to-people-who-do-presentations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/26\/an-open-letter-to-people-who-do-presentations\/","title":{"rendered":"An open letter to people who do presentations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/presentations.png\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" alt=\"presentations.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve seen many presentations that work: presentations with a few slides, with many slides, with no slides. Presentations with text-heavy slides, with image-heavy slides, with a few bullet points, even hand scrawled. Presentations done almost entirely by a sequence of demos; presentations given off the cuff sans microphone.<\/p>\n<p>But there are a lot of things that don\u2019t work in presentations, and I think it comes down to one root problem: presenters don\u2019t realize they are not their audience. You should know, as a presenter, that you aren\u2019t your audience: you\u2019re presenting, they\u2019re listening, you know what you\u2019re going to say, they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>But recently, I\u2019ve had evidence otherwise. Presenters that seem to think you know what they\u2019re thinking. Presenters that seem to think you have access to their slides. Presenters that seem that you are in on every private joke that they tell. Presenters that not only seem to think that they are standing on the podium with them, but are like them in every way \u2013 and like them as well.<\/p>\n<p>Look, let\u2019s be honest. Everyone is unique, and as a presenter, you\u2019re more unique than everyone else. [u*nique |yo\u035eo\u02c8n\u0113k| adj, def (2): distinctive, remarkable, special, or unusual: a person unique enough to give him a microphone for forty-five minutes]. So your audience is not like you \u2014 or they wouldn\u2019t have given you a podium. The room before that podium is filled with people all different from you.<\/p>\n<p>How are they different?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p style=\"display: inline !important;\"><b>First off, they don\u2019t have your slides.<\/b> Fine, you can show them to them. But they haven\u2019t read your slides. They don\u2019t know what\u2019s on your slides. They can\u2019t read them as fast as you can flip through them. Heck, you can\u2019t read them as fast as you can flip through them. You have to give them the audience time to read your slides.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><b>Second, they don\u2019t know what you know.<\/b> They can\u2019t read slides which are elliptical and don\u2019t get to the point. They can\u2019t read details printed only in your slide notes. They can\u2019t read details only on your web site. The only thing they get is what you say and show. If you don\u2019t say it or show it, the audience won\u2019t know it.<\/li>\n<li><b>Third, they probably don\u2019t know you.<\/b> But that\u2019s not an excuse to pour your heart and soul into your presentation. It\u2019s especially not a reason to pour your heart and soul into your bio slide. Your audience does not want to get to know you. They want to know what you know. That\u2019s an excuse to pour into it what they came to hear.<\/li>\n<li><b>Fourth, your audience may not even like you.<\/b> That\u2019s not your fault: they don\u2019t probably know you. But that\u2019s not an excuse to sacrifice content for long, drawn out, extended jokes. Your audience isn\u2019t there to be entertained by you. We call that standup. Humor is an important part of presentations, but only as a balanced part. We don\u2019t call a pile of sugar a meal; we call it an invitation to hyperglycemic shock.<\/li>\n<li><b>Fifth, your audience came to see other people than you.<\/b> You showed up to give your presentation; they came to see a sequence of them. So, after following a too-fast presentation where the previous too-fast presenter popped up a link to his slide notes, please, for the love of G*d, don\u2019t hop up on stage and immediately slap up your detailed bio slide before we\u2019ve had time to write down the tiny URL.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Look, I don\u2019t want to throw a lot of rules at you. I know some people say \u201cno more than 3 bullets per slide, no more than 1 slide per 2 minutes\u201d but I\u2019ve seen Scott McCloud give a talk with maybe triple that density, and his daughter Sky McCloud is even faster and better. There are no rules. Just use common sense.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Don\u2019t jam a 45 minute talk into 25 minutes. Cut something out.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t have a 10 minute funny video at a technical conference. Cut it in half.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t leap up on stage to show your bio slide before the previous presenter is done talking. Wait for people to write down the slides.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t \u201clet the audience drive the talk with questions.\u201d They came to hear your efforts to distill your wisdom, not to hear your off-the-cuff answers to irrelevant questions from the audience.<\/li>\n<li>Don\u2019t end without leaving time for questions. Who knows, you may have made a mistake.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ok. That\u2019s off my chest.<\/p>\n<p>Now to dive back into the fray\u2026<\/p>\n<p>-the Centaur<\/p>\n<p>Pictured: A slide from &#8230; axually a pretty good talk at GDC, not one of the ones that prompted the letter above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve seen many presentations that work: presentations with a few slides, with many slides, with no slides. Presentations with text-heavy slides, with image-heavy slides, with a few bullet points, even&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,20,116],"class_list":["post-2314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-development","tag-philosophy","tag-the-art-of-presentations","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}