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This is the "Schaum's Outlines" of public speaking in a technical context. When ever I give a talk, I read the entirety of speaking.io. This style does lead t

This is the "Schaum's Outlines" of public speaking in a technical context. When ever I give a talk, I read the entirety of speaking.io. This style does lead to slides that make little sense outside the context of the talk. When I reviewed the slides for a talk I gave 18 months ago, I had no idea what the slides were about.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> This style does lead to slides that make little sense outside the context of the talk. When I reviewed the slides for a talk I gave 18 months ago, I had no idea what the slides were about. That happens, but still - I think it's for the best. The way I learned to see it, slides too often are used as crutches by people too afraid of focusing attention on themselves. But that's not how good talks are made. It takes practice to overcome this fear, but you have to. Your public talk is all about your ideas. Which you mostly deliver by speaking them[0]. Slides should have one primary purpose: to help you express your ideas in a clearer way. So e.g. do show a graph or a piece of code you intend to discuss. Do show e.g. a hierarchy of your ideas in a spatial way, if that's a good way for people to imagine the concept. Don't show the points you're going to speak word-for-word. Also, my observation: if you intend to put a joke slide, train transitioning to it well in advance. There aren't many better ways to destroy a joke than to show it on a slide, and then awkwardly proceed to read / explain it. -- [0] - If those ideas are better expressed as an article, just write an article. Also, there's no hurt in doing both - text and public presentations are orthogonal distribution channels.
- schoen 9y ago
  > Your public talk is all about your ideas. Which you mostly deliver by speaking them[0]. Slides should have one primary purpose: to help you express your ideas in a clearer way. One question I have about this is whether some audience members would still benefit from seeing in written form much of what is spoken. I know that the "learning styles" idea has been drawn into significant question, but it seems possible that there are various benefits. An obvious example is when audience members include non-native speakers of the language of the presentation, where it seems clear that same-language subtitling helps comprehension. (I'm a non-native Portuguese speaker and I recently made English subtitles for a friend's Portuguese-language lecture, which I hope to be able to share with the public soon. I was working with Google's autogenerated Portuguese subtitles, which were often very inaccurate. In about ten places, my friend said something that I totally missed, and could still not understand even after watching the video over and over again. But I'm pretty sure a native speaker would have understood all ten, and that I could understand all of them given accurate same-language subtitles.) But maybe this means that people who offer live subtitling of lectures (which is a thing that's been offered at a few conferences, though maybe it's kind of expensive?) are helpful, not that more of the spoken presentation belongs in the slides. So you could have slides that contain very little of the spoken presentation, plus an optional separate subtitle medium that contains the entirety of it.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I'd vote for either publishing a video with subtitles after the conference, and/or a transcript of your talk. If you prepared your talk in advance, you could offer a transcript even before the presentation. If you can get a live translation, that'll be best for non-native speakers, though that's a rare thing (I've only seen it on big TEDx conferences and on religious conventions, where people care very much for non-natives and deaf people to be able to receive the message). Of live subtitling I've never heard before. Related, a good trick for some public talks - if you can, make handouts for everyone, that contain all the charts and pieces of code you'll be showing on your slides and discussing. It's very hard to make something complex fit on a slide in such a way it'll be visible for people in back rows (or people with bad sight). Paper handouts on the other hand have huge resolution and will be right in front of the person reading it; for a typical presentation, you should be able to easily fit all your charts and code examples on a single A4 page. It's a very cheap way to ensure even the finer points don't escape people just because they sit too far.
    - schoen 9y ago
      Thanks for these ideas. I've given talks in English both in places where it wasn't the main language and places where it was. In the former case, most of the audience consisted of non-native speakers and there was generally an obvious specific language that the talk could have been interpreted to by a simultaneous interpreter (and sometimes was!). In the latter case, there were sometimes non-native English speakers in the audience, but they didn't necessarily all have the same native language.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

> This style does lead to slides that make little sense outside the context of the talk. When I reviewed the slides for a talk I gave 18 months ago, I had no idea what the slides were about. That happens, but still - I think it's for the best. The way I learned to see it, slides too often are used as crutches by people too afraid of focusing attention on themselves. But that's not how good talks are made. It takes practice to overcome this fear, but you have to. Your public talk is all about your ideas. Which you mostly deliver by speaking them[0]. Slides should have one primary purpose: to help you express your ideas in a clearer way. So e.g. do show a graph or a piece of code you intend to discuss. Do show e.g. a hierarchy of your ideas in a spatial way, if that's a good way for people to imagine the concept. Don't show the points you're going to speak word-for-word. Also, my observation: if you intend to put a joke slide, train transitioning to it well in advance. There aren't many better ways to destroy a joke than to show it on a slide, and then awkwardly proceed to read / explain it. -- [0] - If those ideas are better expressed as an article, just write an article. Also, there's no hurt in doing both - text and public presentations are orthogonal distribution channels.

schoen 9y ago
> Your public talk is all about your ideas. Which you mostly deliver by speaking them[0]. Slides should have one primary purpose: to help you express your ideas in a clearer way. One question I have about this is whether some audience members would still benefit from seeing in written form much of what is spoken. I know that the "learning styles" idea has been drawn into significant question, but it seems possible that there are various benefits. An obvious example is when audience members include non-native speakers of the language of the presentation, where it seems clear that same-language subtitling helps comprehension. (I'm a non-native Portuguese speaker and I recently made English subtitles for a friend's Portuguese-language lecture, which I hope to be able to share with the public soon. I was working with Google's autogenerated Portuguese subtitles, which were often very inaccurate. In about ten places, my friend said something that I totally missed, and could still not understand even after watching the video over and over again. But I'm pretty sure a native speaker would have understood all ten, and that I could understand all of them given accurate same-language subtitles.) But maybe this means that people who offer live subtitling of lectures (which is a thing that's been offered at a few conferences, though maybe it's kind of expensive?) are helpful, not that more of the spoken presentation belongs in the slides. So you could have slides that contain very little of the spoken presentation, plus an optional separate subtitle medium that contains the entirety of it.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I'd vote for either publishing a video with subtitles after the conference, and/or a transcript of your talk. If you prepared your talk in advance, you could offer a transcript even before the presentation. If you can get a live translation, that'll be best for non-native speakers, though that's a rare thing (I've only seen it on big TEDx conferences and on religious conventions, where people care very much for non-natives and deaf people to be able to receive the message). Of live subtitling I've never heard before. Related, a good trick for some public talks - if you can, make handouts for everyone, that contain all the charts and pieces of code you'll be showing on your slides and discussing. It's very hard to make something complex fit on a slide in such a way it'll be visible for people in back rows (or people with bad sight). Paper handouts on the other hand have huge resolution and will be right in front of the person reading it; for a typical presentation, you should be able to easily fit all your charts and code examples on a single A4 page. It's a very cheap way to ensure even the finer points don't escape people just because they sit too far.
  - schoen 9y ago
    Thanks for these ideas. I've given talks in English both in places where it wasn't the main language and places where it was. In the former case, most of the audience consisted of non-native speakers and there was generally an obvious specific language that the talk could have been interpreted to by a simultaneous interpreter (and sometimes was!). In the latter case, there were sometimes non-native English speakers in the audience, but they didn't necessarily all have the same native language.