This might be part of the issue. If your question is, “how do you figure out what the logical flow is on-the-fly while you’re giving the presentation?” then the answer is simple: You don’t. You figure out the logical flow while you’re making the slides.
Your presentation should have a goal or purpose: to teach something or convince someone. Each slide should be part of a logical progression that marches inexorably toward that goal. What you say to each slide should reflect how the information in it supports your goal.
If you’ve made a slide and you’re not sure how it fits into the logical flow of your presentation, that’s probably an indication that you should throw the slide away. If what ou have to say to the slide is confusing or overly long, that’s probably an indication that you should rework the slide or split it into two. Or throw it away. Bottom line is that people have interpreted the OP as “I need help making slides” because the problems you describe in the OP (“I just cannot seem to explain technical material in a nice logical progression,” “I routinely start in the middle,” “I tend to always overestimate how much the audience knows”) sound like you need help organizing your material, which means you need help making slides.
You haven’t told us what the purpose of these presentations is yet.
The conference I’m involved with has four required slides: title, purpose, outline, and, at the end, conclusions. Do you have an outline slide? Making one helps you see the logical flow all on one page, especially since it has to be short enough to fit on a page.
This is absolutely true; however, sometimes you should start at your conclusion and work backward in order to develop the logical flow, especially if you’re not sure how it flows up front. I don’t mean that you’ll actually write the slides in reverse order, but you can storyboard your slides from conclusion back, and then populate and reorder the as you see fit. It is absolutely fine to throw everything on the wall when you are first drafting the slides; just keep to one idea per slide, and start rearranging and removing slides until you get to a logical flow. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” --Antoine de Saint-Exupery
As for the concern about improvising the flow during the presentation, the simple answer is, “Don’t”. Make your slides follow the presentation, and follow the slides. You don’t need to read directly from the slides (and shouldn’t, as this usually bores the audience to tears to have information on the screen read back to them) but the information on the slides should prompt you and keep you on topic. If you start to address some topic that is not on the slides, either on your own or in response to an audience question, revert back to your flow. If a question comes in that is answered in your presentation but not until later on, respond with, “That is an excellent question, and if you’ll just hold onto that thought for a few minutes we’ll be addressing that in a few slides.” If an audience member asks a question that is not in the scope of your presentation, and you don’t feel comfortable being able to make a controlled digression to address it, merely state, “That’s outside the scope of this talk, but I’d be happy to discuss that with you after the presentation.” Unless you are performing a thesis defense or pitching research to a board of investors, you don’t need to answer every question that comes up in the presentation to the maximum extent. Some audience members (especially in technical reviews) just love to push buttons or ride their own particularly hobbyhorse and will just ask questions to hear their own voice. Don’t let that rattle you or get you off track; just divert the question until later and continue on with your planned flow.
The purpose of the slides is generally either to inform a customer (which may be one person but is usually several people at the same organization) as to technical work we are going to perform (the briefing I gave last week) or work we have already performed. The customer can usually be counted on to be reasonably familiar with both the problem and with general technical knowledge applied to the problem, but not necessarily with the specific technical approach we’re taking or with the specific algorithms we’re using, so that’s the major thrust of what’s being explained. I do always have an outline slide, sometimes several “overview” slides (e.g., a picture concept, then a text outline, then an architecture overview with boxes and arrows showing data flow).
Heh. Well, part of the problem is that people are saying not to write exactly what you’re going to say in the slide (which I agree with), but then I get lost when briefing. That is, my manager and I can brief the exact same slides and he comes across as a model of awesomeness and I come across badly. This has happened both with slides he’s made and with slides I’ve made, so I don’t think it’s just the slides or who’s preparing them, although he does probably make better slides than I do.
Here’s an example.
Imagine a slide that is detailing how to make a PB&J sandwich. On the top of the slide there’s a picture of said sandwich. The bullet points are something like
Making a PB&J sandwich
-Get ingredients (bread, peanut butter, jelly)
-Spread one slice of bread with peanut butter
-Spread jelly on the peanut butter
-Put another slice of bread on top
-Eat!
I think that’s reasonably coherent and follows a reasonably logical outline, yes? Or no?
My manager would brief the slide something like this: “Let’s say you want to make a PB&J sandwich, perhaps for lunch, perhaps you want it for dinner. You need to get out bread, peanut butter, and jelly – if you don’t have any you might need to go to the store first – and if you do have some, the refrigerator is a good place to look for it. You might also look for a plate and a knife, as those are going to be helpful coming up. Okay, what you want is to end up with something like the picture on the top of this slide. The best way I’ve found to do it is to get out two slices and put them on the plate. Ignore one of them, we’ll come back to it later. The other one – remember that knife you got out? Spread that other slice of bread with peanut butter. The thickness of the peanut butter can vary according to your taste. Now we want to get jelly on it; you can use the same knife to glop the jelly on, if you don’t mind getting peanut butter in your jelly, or sometimes I use a spoon to scoop the jelly onto the peanut butter and then spread it out with the knife. Now, you can see that if you take that second slice you put aside at the beginning and place it on top of your peanut-butter-jelly confection, you’ll have a sandwich like the one in the picture – the two slices of bread make it easy to hold while you’re eating without glopping jelly all over. Bon appetit!”
I would say something like this: “So you’ve got a slice of bread, and you put peanut butter on it. Oh, wait, you had to get the bread and peanut butter, and you’re going to need jelly too, came from the, the thing that holds cold food, the, oh yeah, refrigerator, or maybe the grocery store. Then you put jelly on the bread. Now you put the other slice of bread – oh, I forgot to mention that you needed two slices – put that one on top. Then you eat it!”
You see, a lot of my problem is the stuff that isn’t on the slide, like the motivations of why you’re doing what you are (e.g, “the two slices of bread make it easy to hold”) and would make it too long if it were on the slide, but which makes it make a whole lot more sense when you put in. I forget half of it, and remember the other half at inopportune times. Well, that and sometimes skipping bullet points that are on the slide.
But, huh. That was a useful exercise. It really drives home that what a lot of people are saying about having an objective for each slide – I think I understand that when I’m making the slide, but I need to keep that in mind when I brief the slide, and try to say that first. That may keep me on track for the rest of it. I also need to not feel like I need to skip over bullet points in the slide – they’re there for a reason. And if they’re not, I should take them out! And to keep in mind that my task is to inform, not to make myself look like I know what I’m talking about. Well, that would be nice too, but it’s a secondary thing.
And another thing that just occurred to me is that perhaps “easy to hold” should be a bullet on the slide… something like this:
Making a PB&J Sandwich
-Why?
***Filling (for lunch and/or dinner especially)
***Easy to hold (without glops)
***Yummy
-Instructions
***Get out bread…
and so on. So from that point of view it is a slide-making problem.
In conclusion: thanks for the tips, everyone… these are really useful for me to think about, even the ones I thought I understood before this thread! More thoughts?
There’s a lot of really great advice in this thread!
Reading your post above, where you mention whether or not to talk about each point on each slide, and needing to remember to start with the objective for each slide, suggests to me that you’re still working through how to do the presentation itself. My only suggestion here is once you decide what goes in each slide, and how you’re going to present each one, and whether or not to add in stuff not on the slide(s) that might be relevant, please practice your presentation.
As a mouth-breathing non-tecchie, things like this make or break presentations for me. If the presenter rambles off on tangents, or presents some slides with an intro but just blasts through others, I get lost. I also think the more you go over it, the smoother your delivery.
Something I’ve seen in presentations done by Japanese employees in my company is the practice of starting with a one-slide agenda, then beginning each section of the presentation with that very same slide, with the upcoming section bolded or highlighted, and the other sections deliberately shaded in so as to be readable but clearly less visible than the current section. This helps viewers see where they are in the overall presentation, and gives them a quick glimpse of the big picture.
I think it’s great that you’re putting in the effort to improve! Nothing is worse than listening to an expert but coming away with nothing because s/he couldn’t present it effectively.
Do you provide attendees with a copy afterwards? Then they don’t feel they have to scribble down everything you say, and can sit back and listen.
That sounds like you’re not rehearsing enough. Maybe your manager is just such a polished speaker that he can wing it and have it work out, but I think it’s much more likely that he spends a fair amount of time practicing his speeches.
Wow! The lightbulb moment is just as fun online as it is in person.
You might also want to try to design a general approach that you use for most of your slides, and I’m thinking about the middle, most-technical ones. When I flip to a new slide, I always start with a sentence that links it back to the previous slide, some kind of transition. Then, I talk about what’s on the slide. Since these are the technical slides, it is usually an experiment or a flow chart. I use that moment to orient the audience to what they are looking at. Then, I discuss the implications or significance of the info on the slide. Last, some kind of transition or conclusion statement. So, in essence, I’ve made every slide a tiny presentation unto itself. By sticking to that order and going through the slides in order, it’s pretty hard for me to get off track in a presentation.
In rereading, I could distill that to why, how/what, so what, and what’s next.
How many times do you rehearse your speech/presentation before you have to give it? I agree with ultrafilter that you’re not practicing enough. And you really do need to actually practice it out loud, not just in your head. Actually vocalizing your rehearsal makes sure that you’re actually hitting all the points you need to (it can be easy to do a sort of mental fast-forward if it’s just in your head, and you honestly won’t even really notice you’re doing it), it helps you time your presentation accurately, too. And this may sound odd, but you’re training your mouth in addition to your brain. If your mouth (and vocal cords, etc.) repeatedly says the same phrases that you want to use, you’re less likely to draw a blank when it comes to the presentation time.
And to the bolded part in your quote: this is why you make an outline!!!
The outline is for you; the slides, for the audience, are almost a Cliff’s Notes of your outline and do not have everything that you’ll have in front of you.
Outlines are great, because they are less bloated than a fully typed speech yet they lay out your logical structure, important points and transition elements. Reading from a fully typed speech leads to a horrifically boring and stilted presentation (obviously this doesn’t apply to things like presidential addresses, etc.), but reading from brief slides means you may forget that one point’s subpoint that you really wanted to mention.
Example 1 is great for showing that you’re using this outline for you, not for your slides. Every line is very brief, but they’re made to jog your memory so you hit the points you want to hit.
Look at area 2 in example 2; there’s a parenthetical aside that reminds the speaker not to blab on too long about this point and to remember to say this subpoint. I bet that s/he rehearsed several times and noted that s/he tends to stay on that topic too long. Actually writing that reminder helps him/her stay on track.
Outlines are fantastic!
[ul]
[li]When you start: creating an outline automatically gives you the structure and flow of your presentation.[/li][li]When rehearsing: you become familiar with hitting your points and subpoints and also see where you may need to tweak your outline (like in example 2).[/li][li]When presenting, it gives you your points and subpoints, and has reminders for the snappy comments you want to make sure to include.[/li][/ul]
Oh, sure! The biggest thing I’ve learned since I started working 6 years ago was that I had to practice* multiple* times before giving a presentation. (Once I learned that, I even got a promotion, and my manager – who is usually the one with me when I present to the customer – cited “great improvement in presenting” as one of the major reasons.) Trouble is, I don’t always have time to practice before doing the draft version at work, and that’s the one the Big Boss sees, which is affecting the current state of my career. I suppose that if I take anything away from this thread, it’s that I should make time for practicing at least the slides I’m likely to have the most trouble with before giving even the draft version – even if I only practice the two or three worst ones that’s bound to be better than nothing at all. And yes, I have learned through painful experience that it has to be vocal (probably drives the people sitting next to me in the plane nuts – I try to subvocalize but I don’t exactly how successful I am.)
I guess I had the idea that most people are able to do it on the fly without practicing, because my manager – oh, heck, this is getting tedious, let’s call him Alvin – and my husband can do it with no problem (and I know they don’t practice – especially Alvin, whom I see working on his slides up until five minutes before), but the consensus seems to be that this isn’t really the case. I can see that, I think. Alvin likes to talk, and he really likes to teach – half the time I go talk to him he ends up explaining something to me because he thinks it’s cool. My husband doesn’t like to talk, but he does like constructing logical arguments; he writes up mathematical proofs in his spare time (he’s not a mathematician). So both my husband and Alvin think about how to present things logically basically all the time, whereas my spare time is more likely to be spent reading novels (or Goodnight Moon to the kidlet… from brush to bowl full of mush there’s not a big logical progression…)
So, in addition to giving me lots of useful tips, y’all are also helping my self-confidence, thanks! I was feeling really low thinking that all technical people could do this without practicing.
zweisamkeit, I never thought of making a written outline for the spoken part (though I always make outline slides). (I think I misunderstood your point before; sorry.) That does sound like it would be helpful.
Far from it! It takes a lot of practice; and you will get better results (and a heckuva lot of respect from the PTB) if you are so practiced and well-prepared that you make it look easy.
I’ve spoken and presented for years, so for me it is second nature. But my ex-wife was put into a position at work where she had to make a lot of presentations, and she was a little worried about it. The upshot is that I don’t know how many nights and weekends I helped and coached her, working on her slides and listening to the same presentation over and over again. But one day I had the opportunity to watch and listen to her presentation. I’m pleased to say that all the hard work paid off–she not only knew her material thoroughly, but appeared so calm and cool during it that she gained a lot of respect from her colleagues and from management.
So, make time to practice as much as you can. If my ex’s experience is anything to go by, it helps!
I’ll tell you what Alvin is doing: he’s practicing in a way, it’s just not exactly like the way you’re practicing. As a general rule of thumb, each slide in your presentation should make one or two main points; each of these points should be clearly outlined in the slide and the talk, should directly support the main purpose of the presentation, and should be strung together in a logical, connected fashion. (As with any general rule of thumb, this can be successfully broken in many circumstances, but we’ll gloss over that for now.)
What Alvin is doing is focusing on these main points, making sure he can clearly relay them, and they’re in the right order with the right emphasis. If they’re not, that means reordering slides, adding or deleting slides, or clarifying material on the slides. That’s why you see him working on his slides up until five minutes before: he’s practicing and refining the high-level logical flow connecting the presentation, not the individual words he uses on each slide.
If you want to step up your presentation skills, be more like Alvin. Now, I’m not suggesting that you don’t practice vocalizing the actual words you use. But also think about the logical flow of the presentation. Identify exactly the one or two important ideas on each slide, and keep them in mind when presenting. Make sure your audience gets those ideas–if you do that, you can afford a few stumbles on the minor things.
Identifying and focusing on and connecting together specific main ideas isn’t necessarily easy–you’re essentially simplifying a complex presentation, which is itself a simplification of even more complex work behind it. Like any other skill, it takes practice. But it gives you a more holistic perspective of what your presentation is trying to achieve–what you’re conveying to the audience–than concentrating exclusively on th string of words you’re going to say.
spoons, thanks for the encouragement. Your post also made me realize that a lot of the people I think are really good on the fly presenters, like Alvin, have been doing this for a long time, and have been presenting much more than me, so that is a large part of it too.
Zut, that really helps me think about it. Yes, once you identified that for me, i can see that Alvin and my husband both do that. Of course, they are also much better at doing individual words without having to practice them, but that is just something I will have to additionally work on.
You guys… You are the best. This is such a helpful thread. I wish I’d made it ten years ago as a grad student.
I am currently on practice round 2 (normally I need 3) and I can feel it coming together a lot better. I will keep you guys posted as to how the actual meeting goes tomorrow. Big boss is at that one so this is my chance to redeem myself with him as well. Off to do practice round 3…
Here’s how I would do it. Or would hope to do it. I know a guy who is very good at this, and he would do it this way.
Slide 1: picture of the goal, the sandwich.
Slide 2. Show the raw ingredients, possibly animating them as they arrive. You could even put in some humor, like sliding in PB brand 1, saying, not, get a good one, and dumping it in place of PB brand 2.
In the next few slides you build your sandwich, one ingredient at a time. If you can find pictures of partially assembled sandwiches that would be great. Otherwise, the ingredients just vanish as you use them.
Last slide - the sandwich again, objective achieved.
No words at all, and the process is in the slides so you can’t get lost.
Now, you might say you are talking about algorithms, and can’t use this model. My friend is also talking about algorithms, very complex algorithms, and his talks show what the algorithms are doing.
Question: how good are you at telling jokes? Because giving a talk is a lot like telling a fairly complicated joke. You need to do things logically and in the right order for it to work.
Part of Alvin’s apparent polish in presenting individual words is experience with presentations, I’m sure. However, I think some of it comes from the process.
I used to approach presentations in the way (I infer) that you do. Define the presentation, divide it into slides, order them straighforwardly, figure out what to say on each slide, and practice the best wording for each slide.
I’ve since changed my approach to be more like what (I infer) Alvin does, where I look at the overall goal of the presentation and define the logical steps to get there. Then I really structure each slide around one or two of these core logical steps, and try to get these ideas across as clearly as possible. For me, the emphasis on ideas actually makes the *wording *easier, because I don’t have to memorize or practice a string of words in order, I just need to remember one or two fundamental items per slide, and these are reinforced by the slide itself. The individual words are then much easier to produce, even extemporaneously.
I still need to think about wording, and I still give a better delivery with some practice. But now I can give a credible presentation cold, or adjust on the fly to the audience, where I never would have been able to do that earlier.
That doesn’t help you in the short term, I don’t think, because like anything else this takes practice. I’m saying, though, that I think Alvin’s apparently effortless presentations are due in part to his fundamental approach, and there’s no reason you couldn’t do the same thing.
I’ve been giving tech presentations for many years to a variety of audiences. For me, I started off very clumsy but very gradually learned my own strengths and weaknesses and now build my presentations around myself as a presenter.
Example, I’m very poor at long narratives and poor at being dynamically entertaining. So I build my slides to keep the topic moving and progressing, more slides with less time spent on any one slide, and resummarize frequently.
I’m good at filling in the gaps verbally, and will “walk and talk around a graphic” instead of reading a ling list of bullet points or text. My audience knows how to read and doesn’t need me to read for them. It also gives the impression that you really know your stuff and aren’t a slave to the text.
Up front, have a plan for how to handle questions or comments, and tell your audience up front what that plan is. E.g. “Please hold your questions until afterward, I’ll be available for 30 minutes afterward to talk in more detail” or “I’ll be happy to answer questions as best as I can, but may have to log them and have our technical expert follow up with you later”.
The speed with which you talk is inversely proportional to the size and paygrade of your audience You can talk rapidly with shortened jargon to a small room of colleagues, but an audience hall filled with managers and marketers means talk very slowly and deliberately. A lost audience is a hostile audience.
Stagefright tip…find something comparatively much more scary to do before giving the speech, or recall a past scary activity that you’ve lived through. I used to spar in my martial arts group before a big speech day–having roundhouse kicks whistling at your head makes the speech seem like a relaxing break
One more thing I learned from my thesis adviser when we were at a conference - listen to those who go before you. If there was a talk before yours, mention anything in it which is related to yours. If there was discussion, as is often the case in client meetings, refer back to it, as in “this feature will be very useful in meeting your requirement of X…”.
Especially useful if you are third of three papers in a session. I’ve sometimes said, “Bill covered this background in his talk, so I’ll skip it” which give more time for the good stuff.
Especially with graphics, sometimes it helps if you “become a weather reporter,” for lack of a better term.
Think of the weather reporter in front of his or her map. As he or she speaks, he or she is making very general hand movements over the map. “So up here [general circular motion of the hand], we have a cold front moving in. It’ll come southwest [hand moves in a southwest motion], over Littleville, and then Smalltown [circles in the towns’ general areas]–you folks may want to get the wet-weather gear ready–and it should hit Big City [circles] by tomorrow morning before moving off to the east on Thursday.” [Another eastbound hand movement.] But never does the weather reporter point at anything in particular–it’s just hand motions in the general area of something.
Now, the weather reporter is really in front of a green screen, and is looking at the entire picture on a monitor to the side, but the reporter does occasionally address the camera, and thus, the viewers. You should address your audience too, and you have the luxury of having your graphic behind you if you need a quick glance. At any rate, this “weather reporter” principle can be used to good effect if you have a simple graphic showing (say) various boxes connected in various ways. “The message originates in the host [circles the host], travels over the network [back and forth along the line representing the network], and ends up in the client [more circles in the client’s general area].”
Why is this a good technique? Two reasons:
It removes the need for you to look at the screen in order to indicate exactly where something is. So you can look at your audience while you speak. Thus, you maintain eye contact with your audience (watch for signs of confusion), and they can hear you more easily. (And if you do need to indicate exactly where something is, maybe your graphic is too complicated.)
It brings you out from behind the podium or lectern or whatever you are behind. IME, this makes you more accessible to the audience–if they are confused or unsure of something, I have found that they are not as afraid to ask questions when you are “unprotected” by a barrier.
Of course, you cannot use this technique in large lecture rooms with huge screens that are out of your reach, but in smaller meeting rooms, it can certainly be used.
Voyager, I’m terrible at telling jokes. This probably comes as no surprise to you.
Zut, again, I like this way of looking at it. And I’m much more interested in how I can improve my presentation skills long-term than short-term.
Gargoyle, you sound a lot like me. Your post also makes me realize that one of the things that has been frustrating me is that Alvin is very good at long narratives and being dynamically entertining, and I am not, and I should stop trying to be him. And that when I borrow slides from him, I should rework those to play to my strengths instead of his. (I’ve noticed that left to our own devices, I tend to make much more graphics heavy slides than he does, because I need them for an anchor much more than he does; the man can seriously brief a wall of text really well.)
Also, heh, I seem to have gotten better at stage fright since my baby was born -a combo of “look, I’ve gone through childbirth, surely I can do this!” and being constantly distracted from stage fright by “oh man, I hope she hasn’t torn up the house this morning…”
A lot of good advice here. let me chip with some more.
-don’t be afraid to blank the screen and just TALK WITH your audience
-Get feedback from them as you go, ask them questions and get answers from them (this needs careful facilitation from you though)
-Imagine that you are talking through this topic with a friend, whenever you feel you need to reach for a pen and paper to make a point, that is where you need a graphic slide. otherwise let your words do the job and have simple relevant summaries (you can always put together a more complicated technical package as a takeaway)
-Relate each part of your presentation back to your initial point, hammer home the linkages
Remember all those times you have been in presentations? None of us like to have walls of text, none of us like to have the slides read to us, we all like to be asked our opinions and listened to, none of us like a script, we like to laugh, and most of all…we want the presenter to do well and very rarely will people set out to trip you up. (and even if someone throws in a very tricky question , with a bit of skilled audience manipulation you can get one of them to answer it and make it seem like you knew all along!)
So I gave the presentation today. It… went really, really well. (Part of that was not me; sometimes the customer doesn’t engage at all, and sometimes s/he is aggressive, and this one struck just the right balance of assertive enough to give us helpful feedback but nice too, which was awesome.) Big boss even told me last night, “These slides look pretty good!” (I had reworked them) and today, “You did a good job!” (Thanks! Don’t sound so surprised! ) Since his usual comments after watching me brief are on the order of “You need to completely redo this” or “You need to practice this,” this is high praise indeed.
I had to reorganize some of the discussion on the fly based on the customer’s comments, but that was a lot easier because everything fit together in a nice way, so I could pick and choose what to talk about – and I naturally am better at compressing a talk (which is what I had to do) than explaining more, as is probably obvious from my previous post complaints. I did start flailing at a couple of the questions (some were things I legitimately didn’t know the answer to, but one was an easy softball but I got stuck going down the wrong path; in retrospect it’s kind of embarrassing because it was a purely technical point about updating Bayesian probabilities that I should have been able to answer immediately) but Big Boss stepped in smoothly enough that it wasn’t noticeable, probably even by him.
Anyway, my point is… thanks, Dopers! I haven’t responded to every single poster (hey, I had to find time to practice sometime! ) but I think this is one of very few, if not the only, thread I’ve seen on the Dope where every single post was chock full of useful information. (Uh, except maybe mine. But I’m the OP so I don’t count. And even then, responding to your points often helped me pinpoint where my problems were.) So thank you, even if I didn’t respond to you individually and even if you responded to something that wasn’t what I intended as my original question – even though I didn’t have making the slides in mind when I asked it, I did have all your points in mind when I reworked them, and I think having them in mind made my slides much stronger.
(I also realized something else: I should trust myself rather than Big Boss’s comments. He obviously knows a lot more and has given a lot more briefings than I have, so he is usually right, but if I disagree with him as to what to put in the briefing, I should trust my own instincts, because I know what I’m trying to accomplish in the flow and he doesn’t. A couple of the things that threw me badly on Friday were places where he had told me to insert things that didn’t fit what many posters in this thread have rightly said I should focus on: the overall message.)
I was feeling really low thinking that all technical people could do this without practicing.
You can talk rapidly with shortened jargon to a small room of colleagues, but an audience hall filled with managers and marketers means talk very slowly and deliberately. A lost audience is a hostile audience.
