Tips to rock your next conference talk
rizwanjavaid.com
rizwanjavaid.com
I am on board with "hook them from the start", but you have to change it for an academic crowd. They will bristle at trying to be sensational. In an academic computer science context, it means put your conclusions first, along with your best results. People may tune out after the first few minutes, so you'd better tell them the most important stuff right away. The rest of your talk is then supporting and explaining how you achieved your best results.
I can't tell you how many presentations I sit through (or emails I read) that read like murder mysteries. Tell me the conclusion or essential element up front, so that I can frame my consumption a little better. Don't start with the Big Bang, the creation of matter, the coalescing into galaxies and planets, etc, etc and then build up the conclusion from all those constituent elements.
I would recommend the book "Even a geek can speak".
I did find the tips the author shared. But if you are fundamentally a poor speaker, you want to work on the fundamentals rather than marginal tips.
During the talk itself there's high expectations. People may have paid a lot, travelled overnight, found a baby sitter to be there. But during the travel time and breaks the expectations are much lower.
Use that time to your advantage. Tell a joke, an anecdote related to your topic, ask a good question of the audience. Start building that rapport before your slot even begins.
This helps your audience warm up to you, and helps you slide more comfortably into your talk.
[0] www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/talks/talk.pdf
- Make sure to provide a text version of your talk online, in a sane format.
- Keep text off your slides. Use them to show code, or kittens, but not bullet points.
- Remember that you're speaking to an intelligent audience. They'll have more fun if you leave some stuff unsaid, and let them come to their own conclusions.
- Go through the painful process of watching yourself speak on video, to identify and correct the many verbal tics you didn't know you had.
- Have a single shot of booze ten minutes before liftoff
This seems like a fantastic idea and it makes a lot of sense, given I can often make up a lot on the spot. The questions for self let me capitalise on that but also keep it on topic and in the correct direction, not forgetting things.
I never however "pre-write" my talk, but I do tend to write quite a lot of dot points or occasionally sentances into the speaker notes to try and remember.
This also works MUCH MUCH better if you can see your speaker notes in a "stage monitor" type position so you don't look away from the audience to a laptop but sadly that is rarely the case.
For the most part you don't come off as having scripted the whole talk, but there are tells in your transcripts that they were written first.
I think of it as crossing a stream, and there are certain rocks that I have to make sure I step on. But getting between them is somewhat improvisational.
Initially I took to putting more text on the slides to counter that and give them some words to lock onto if they weren't catching the word or otherwise something to follow. This helped to some extent but I have since learnt what works better is to write a lot more into the "Speaker Notes" and distribute a copy of the file to them before the talk starts. Then they can follow along and when they get lost look at the speaker notes to try and get themselves in sync.