Tips For Presentations
Obviously it depends on the type of presentation, but here's what I currently do for my talks:
Slides should only have images and headlines, not reading-text. People will naturally read whatever text is on a big screen, and they will not listen to you while reading the text, so anything more than ~5 words on a slide is going to kill the mood in the room while people read your slide instead of paying attention to you.
Put timestamps in your presentation notes. Decide in advance how long your presentation should be, time yourself giving the talk beforehand (multiple times), and put timestamps in your notes e.g. [2:00], [3:00], [4:00] at the relevant spots in the slides.
The point is not too hit those marks on the day– you will inevitably talk slower or faster at times, start late, get on a tangent, skip a slide, whatever. The point is to know how you're running relative to standard, like the pacers in a marathon, and then know when you need to slow down / speed up accordingly.
Don't panic. Like parties (and babies), audiences react to your stress. Put serious attention into feeling relaxed so that the audience feels relaxed with you. Also, the audience has no idea what you were planning to say, so it's far better to skip a section or fudge something but stay calm than to stress the audience out by spending a bunch of time backtracking.
This is also important in case of tech issues, which are legion. Whatever happens, just smile and roll with it. On that note:
Set a person in the audience who will tell you if something bad is happening technologically, and assume otherwise everything's fine. It's bad if the speaker is inaudible, but it's also bad if the speaker keeps stopping to ask "can everyone hear me?," or gets flustered about the fact that they think people can't hear them.
Microphone and speaker technology are weird, as professional musicians know. I once gave a talk where, due to the audio setup, I was hearing myself echo on every word; I briefly thought about stopping the talk to check about that, but that's exactly the kind of stressed-out behaviour that stresses audiences. And when I asked my friends afterwards they had no idea what I was talking about it, it was just an issue for the speakers on stage.
It turns out the solution to all of this is to have ONE person (in the audience, or running the talk) who has solemnly sworn they will give you a signal if there are any issues, then you as speaker assume there are no issues until told otherwise. Thanks to the excellent NerdNite for showing me how this works.
Practice a ton, to the point where you've given the entire talk multiple times in full before you're doing it live for an audience. I'm repeating this one because it's probably the most important.
In some sense I feel like "practice a lot" is obvious but I also see a lot of people not-doing it, and I'm not sure I fully internalised how much you need to do it until Friend-of-the-blog N. gave me advice before a talk once.
For my most recent talk, I downloaded the screen recording software OBS and did four full run-throughs of the talk in the week leading up to it. I didn't watch all those recordings in full, but it was super helpful both in terms of helping me feel calm with the material and in terms of figuring out the structure and timing of the talk.
I think there's all kinds of cope that people tell themselves about being "better when improvising" or whatever, but I mostly think we wish that were true because practicing is annoying and hard. I do think that talks benefit from some live flexibility – I wouldn't want to watch someone recite a talk word-for-word from memory – but realistically you're going to be a better Flexible Improviser if you've got a really solid foundation first. So have a clear plan for your talk and get to the point where you can do that version unhesitatingly, even if you later deviate from your plan on the day.