5 ms·
I tend to extrapolate this tip into a more general rule: no meta-talk. For the speaker, preparing the talk has been top of mind for the past N hours/days/weeks
by mrshoe 17y ago
I tend to extrapolate this tip into a more general rule: no meta-talk.
For the speaker, preparing the talk has been top of mind for the past N hours/days/weeks. Not so for the audience. If you think about the situation from their perspective, you'll realize they don't want to hear about how you prepared the talk or how you approached the talk (usually). They want to hear your thoughts on the topic -- the result of your preparation.
This rule generally eliminates phrases like "while preparing this talk, I realized...", "when Joe asked me to give this talk...", "I didn't really prepare for this talk...", "I get nervous giving talks like this...", etc.
In almost all cases, you can simply strike those phrases from the script and your talk will be more focused and concise for it.
- ivankirigin 17y ago"This slide has my favorite joke of the talk" "Sorry this slide has a lot of text on it, I usually try to avoid it" Reading slides is also idiotic.
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoSome people absorb info better when they view it, others when they hear it. Consider it pre-prepared closed captions and then perhaps it's OK?
- ugh 17y agoThen why talk? Reading is faster than listening. And this alone will get your audience horribly out of sync with you. Use slides as a support structure, don’t duplicate what you are seeing. And if you really want to make all those happy that prefer reading to listening don’t just dump your uncommented slides on them afterwards.
- mdemare 17y agoGreat rule! "I will now discuss the implications of the foo build structure" is lethally boring. There is however one exception: http://consc.net/misc/moser.html http://consc.net/misc/moser.html
- jeresig 17y agoThis is a great rule. I follow it in all my talks and in all my blog posts, as well. Meta talk is, frankly, rather boring and distracts from the primary focus of the talk/post. I find that when you intentionally attempt to steer away from being self-referential your writing becomes much more lucid and to the point. You're no longer dwelling on the process but driving home a singular point. I do have one corollary, though: Anecdotes work great for talks and blog posts. Instead of talking about "when I was writing this post/presentation" talk about "there was this one time when this user did X" or "when I was working on this team Y happened." They're almost universally a crowd pleaser.
- jf 17y agoI've generalized that into a sign I keep in my offices: http://sargo.com/joel/_images/NO_META.pdf http://sargo.com/joel/_images/NO_META.pdf
- akamaka 17y agoJohn Stewart's "Meta-President" segment demonstrates this point better than anything else I've seen: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-9-2007/loud-and-clear http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-9-2007/loud-an...