[HN Gopher] Start presentations on the second slide
___________________________________________________________________
Start presentations on the second slide
Author : andyjohnson0
Score : 271 points
Date : 2024-06-14 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tidyfirst.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tidyfirst.substack.com)
| OskarS wrote:
| It's very true. When watching programming talks on YouTube, I
| often hover the mouse over the time bar to find the first preview
| which looks like the slide has syntax highlighted code on it. I'm
| here for the cool coding stuff, not the preamble!
| 8372049 wrote:
| Rule of thumb for Youtube videos is to hit 3 to get to where
| the video actually starts.
|
| Obviously not meant to be taken literally, but surprisingly
| often could be.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| Genius for technical presentations.
|
| I must admit, though, I'm always turned off when entertainment
| mediums do this (fiction novels, TV Shows, etc.). If the action
| sequence doesn't need any background info to make sense, I argue
| you can just skip the background info altogether. Don't ramp the
| pace up and then drop it back down to nothing so quickly.
| HPsquared wrote:
| News stories do this a lot, particularly sports or politics.
| But I suppose they lead with the most important part of the
| story so there's a reason for it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| In entertainment mediums it often feels like a last-minute
| band-aid. A novel ramps up too slowly, test readers are giving
| up on the story before the interesting stuff happens, so the
| editor suggests "let's just put that cool fight scene in
| chapter 10 in the beginning so people know what the book is
| really about". That rarely works well
| simonw wrote:
| I gave a talk at PyCon a few weeks ago where I was really
| struggling to fit my content into the time slot.
|
| I ended up editing out the first couple of minutes of the talk -
| the bit where I ramped up to the topic, gave a little bit of
| background about why I was qualified to talk about it, that kind
| of thing.
|
| Instead I launched straight into my first point (which included a
| good joke)... and it worked.
|
| A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough you
| can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material, and if
| you combine that with a joke you can capture the audience's
| attention just fine.
| matsemann wrote:
| I agree, but one good thing about starting with the soft and
| boring parts (like your name and credentials), is that it's
| easy to do when you're nervous in the beginning. Can't really
| stumble that too much, and then you're warmed up for the real
| talk. But of course, the shorter you can keep it the better.
| Instead I often try to memorize my first lines, word by word.
| Then I know I will nail them when at my most anxious, and then
| the rest can be talking more freely.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I also assumed that part of the first few minutes was filler
| while butts are still trying to find seats, still chatting
| amongst themselves, or haven't quite closed whichever social
| media app as well as letting the presenter shake off any
| butterflies
| ghaff wrote:
| That's a good point.
|
| A presentation isn't really a written story or even a film.
| You don't want the people who missed the first few minutes
| to be "dazed and confused." :-) You don't want to do too
| much throat clearing (to use the metaphor a former boss
| used with respect to writing research pieces). But you
| probably don't want the first few minutes to be too
| essential to be jumping into the rest of the talk either.
| larsrc wrote:
| I always have the title and my name and organisation on the
| first slide, which is just shown while everybody comes in.
| That lets everyone know if they're in the right place.
| ghaff wrote:
| And I do usually have a bio slide right after as well. But
| I spend about 15 seconds on it. I also (usually) have basic
| contact info on my slide masters so people know how to
| contact me without snapping a shot of the right slide.
| nonfamous wrote:
| I like to put my name, contact info, and reference link on
| the _last_ slide. This is when they'll actually need it (if
| they want to follow up with you), latecomers won't miss it,
| and it's usually on the screen for a long time during q &a so
| people have time to jot it down or snap a picture.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Nothing makes me more nervous than talking about myself... I
| pretty much always skip the intro slides (other than having
| my name on the title).
| wongarsu wrote:
| It's a bit of an audience thing, but for a talk at a technical
| conference I tend to roll my eyes at introduction slides. I
| already chose to attend your talk, telling me why it's
| interesting is preaching to the choir. And typical hacker ethic
| involves judging people by their skills, not their credentials.
| You can slip in a "btw I invented the thing we are talking
| about". But don't read me your CV, impress me with your
| insights.
|
| This isn't true in all contexts. Some audiences care a lot
| about credentials. And if people don't choose to be at your
| talk specifically you have to give enough context. But even
| then you are often better off catching their attention first,
| and once you got it bring it back to the introduction
| foobarian wrote:
| I think there is a lot of cargo culting in presentations.
| Title slide? But of course we must have a title slide, that
| is the way. And an introduction, and motivation... everybody
| else has one!
| bee_rider wrote:
| A motivation slide can be useful if you are giving a
| presentation to people who are more experienced than you
| (which, for any given audience, there ought to be some). It
| tells them what built in assumptions you made without being
| aware of.
| supplied_demand wrote:
| The presentation may eventually be viewed by people who
| aren't in the room to hear you speak. In that instance, a
| title/intro slide makes perfect sense.
| chatmasta wrote:
| You don't need to present from the same copy of the
| slides you distribute.
| mandevil wrote:
| Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a
| presentation, and separately as a way to learn or review
| material outside of the presentation. Unfortunately they
| are at cross-purposes. For accompanying an oral
| presentation you don't want lots of data, you want a simple
| clear image that sync with what you are saying, and to
| change them rapidly. For learning outside the actual
| presentation, you want rich, detailed slides with lots of
| data on them, and leave them up for a while so people can
| absorb the information.
|
| Ideally, we would build two different decks, each optimized
| for their purpose. But no one has time for that, so people
| try and do both in one deck, generally going with lots of
| information except for one or two images keyed to specific
| jokes. And it makes the whole thing less effective.
| andrecarini wrote:
| Ideally you'd have slides purely for presentation, and an
| accompanying interactive self-contained HTML document for
| the _documentation_ of the talk.
| ghaff wrote:
| And nobody wants to do both (or has the incentive to do
| both). I'll do sorta-both but probably in an informal way
| --e.g. article that grew out of a talk--or vice versa.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Handouts and speaker notes are a thing, although people
| rarely use them both when building presentations and when
| reviewing them later.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a
| presentation..._
|
| Many years ago I went to a presentation on giving good
| presentations, focusing on making good slide decks. (It's
| currently annoying me that I can't remember where this
| was, even though I can picture the room in my head.)
|
| The presenter had a short example slide deck, and gave a
| mock technical presentation using it.
|
| The deck had a different, eye-catching background image
| for each slide, chosen to be noticeable, but not dominate
| attention, and be well-suited color-wise for any text or
| images to be placed on top of the background. The
| presenter suggested that the background image didn't need
| to have anything to do with the content of the slide, and
| that it's mainly there for its general visual impact. The
| slides were not uniformly designed. It wasn't like
| someone had used a template where the title, text,
| images, etc. were all in the same or similar places on
| each slide. The most noticeable part of this was putting
| the title in different places. This variety was in itself
| engaging.
|
| The slides themselves were _very_ light on text, and were
| mostly about presenting charts, graphs, tabular data, or
| images relevant to the talk. When there was text, the
| presenter never read the text verbatim (or sometimes even
| at all); the text there was a jumping-off point to
| discuss in detail whatever the topic of the slide was.
| The argument there was that people know how to read, can
| read in their heads faster than you can read to them out
| loud, and if you 're just going to read slides to them,
| you don't need to present it and you should instead just
| email a document for your attendees to read, and skip the
| presentation entirely.
|
| Finally, the slide deck itself did not have all that many
| slides. The presenter dwelled on each slide a lot longer
| than I've seen in most presentations. The slides were
| more guideposts to mark the overall topics and outline of
| the presentation, to provide milestones and transitions.
| For the most part, the presentation could have been done
| without the slides at all; the slides were there to add
| visual flair, help keep attention, and (occasionally)
| prevent data or images that would be easier to understand
| visually rather than spoken.
|
| Ultimately I found the mock presentation given to be
| incredibly engaging, much more so than the vast majority
| of presentations I'd attended before or have attended
| since, and I remember that the topic wasn't even
| something that would usually hold my interest so tightly.
| I very rarely gave/give presentations, but I've tried to
| take all this to heart when I had the opportunity to do
| so. I don't think I ever really did the variety-of-
| background-images thing (honestly, I never enjoyed giving
| presentations, and treated it as a chore, and never felt
| motivated enough to find a bunch of suitable background
| images). But I at least always tried to keep text to a
| minimum, so the meat of my talk would be in what I was
| saying out loud. I wouldn't call myself a particularly
| good presenter or public speaker, but I think my talks
| were better than they otherwise would have been.
|
| > _Slides have two distinct purposes: [...] as a way to
| learn or review material outside of the presentation_
|
| I've come to think that slides aren't very good for this
| second purpose, and probably shouldn't be. The
| information density is never going to be high enough, and
| if it is, that's going to make for a terrible slide
| during the presentation. I would much rather read a
| transcript of the talk later, or, better, a detailed
| summary. If the slides have charts or other data, then
| sure, it's useful to have those outside of the talk, but
| those can also be inserted in-line into the transcript or
| summary.
|
| I get that it's more work to write up a transcript or
| summary (and I know I myself would probably balk at
| having to do this), but if you've prepared properly for
| the presentation, you probably already more or less have
| something approaching a transcript in your talk notes.
| Cleaning them up for publication isn't zero effort, of
| course, but it should be much less work than writing
| something from scratch.
| Minor49er wrote:
| What you're saying makes sense, though "cargo culting" is
| not the right term here
| digging wrote:
| Right, that's just the normal way people learn to do
| something they haven't been trained or educated to do.
| Look at how other people successfully do it. You don't
| just discard every feature you don't immediately see the
| value of or you might jettison the important bits. Once
| you're more confident you understand the skill, you can
| drop the rituals you don't find useful.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Counterpoint:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming
|
| > Cargo cult programming is a style of computer
| programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code
| or program structures that serve no real purpose.
|
| > Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice
| of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly
| without understanding the reasons behind that design
| principle.
|
| Arguably, designing a presentation in a particular way
| out of habit or convention would fall under one or both
| of these definitions.
|
| It's a common vernacular usage.
|
| > As awareness of cargo cults spread in the West, they
| became a metaphor for empty promises and rituals, used
| most prominently by physicist Richard Feynman. The term
| "cargo-cult programming" appeared in version 2.5.1 of the
| Jargon File, a glossary of computing slang, released in
| January 1991.
| ghaff wrote:
| Knowing your audience is a big thing in general.
|
| If the talk isn't to some large degree about your journey,
| that probably shouldn't be the focus. But also, face it, your
| talk isn't going to work for everyone. When I was doing a lot
| of keynotes, I'd get feedback on the same talk to the effect
| of "That was great. It really helped me understand $X" and "I
| was totally lost." Even given technical difficulty ratings,
| no one pays any attention.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think the main value of the first two slides is: if you've
| done a lot of presentations it can be difficult to keep them
| straight.
|
| The first slide is really for you, to make sure you opened
| the right file.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The title slide I see more for the audience: You are in the
| right room (and there was no schedule change you missed)
| that's also why I try to keep the title on that slide as
| announced.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| People appreciate it. Seriously.
|
| A big pet peeve of mine is long intros. 30 seconds is probably
| fine but minutes is way too long. This goes for talks, youtube
| videos, etc.
|
| I get why people do it, they want to reduce risk by addressing
| things that could go wrong (is this person qualified? I don't
| understand the context. Etc) but man be a little brave and get
| to the point.
| codazoda wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think YouTube rewards you for this. At least
| it feels that way based on how long YouTube video's take to
| get to the point
| Kwpolska wrote:
| This might be caused by mid-roll ads. Videos need to be 8
| minutes long to qualify for those, and you want people to
| actually reach the ad.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| "hi, I'm x, I work at y, and have had an interest
| in/experience with z" is ussally good enough.
| gumby wrote:
| > A lesson I learned is that if the topic is interesting enough
| you can skip the intro and jump straight in to that material,
| and if you combine that with a joke you can capture the
| audience's attention just fine.
|
| This is important in sales as well.
|
| I hate getting a sales pitch where they tell me the history of
| the company. Big Japanese companies are the worst in this
| regard for some reason.
|
| For each slide, imagine the audience is going to get up and
| leave unless you give them a reason to read _the next slide_.
| You don 't need to justify your existence if I don't really
| know what you have to offer.
|
| Plus it's all about me (the listener) not you (the presenter).
| el_benhameen wrote:
| > For each slide, imagine the audience is going to get up and
| leave unless you give them a reason to read the next slide.
|
| This is great advice, and I've been trying to apply it to my
| writing in general. Each sentence, and even each word, should
| give your reader a reason to stick around. Fluff has its
| place in fiction and long-form writing, but most day-to-day
| writing should be information-dense.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I hate getting a sales pitch where they tell me the
| history of the company. [...] Plus it 's all about me (the
| listener) not you (the presenter)._
|
| Excellent point. Many presenters probably see the talk as an
| opportunity to give their organization some
| publicity/marketing[0] in addition to the content of the
| talk. But... no, no one wants to sit through an ad about you
| and your company's background in order to get to the
| interesting stuff.
|
| I think a reasonable compromise there is that your _last_
| slide can have a blurb about your company on it, and maybe
| you just leave it there for attendees to read themselves (or
| not) as you wrap up, without reading it to them.
|
| [0] I imagine this is a component of why companies encourage
| their employees to go give talks at conferences. I remember
| one company I worked at would completely reimburse employees
| for conference attendance, no questions asked, if they were
| also giving a talk there. But if they just wanted to attend
| the conference, they had to justify what they and the company
| would be getting out of it, and write up and present
| something useful they learned when they got back. I wouldn't
| be surprised if they booked some of the cost as a marketing
| expense in the first case.
| babyshake wrote:
| An alternative is to do the first couple minutes of your talk
| at 2x speed and then suddenly slow down to a normal pace when
| you reach the interesting part. That should get their
| attention.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| In that case, is the "first slide" even that important?
| inhumantsar wrote:
| it's not that it's not important, it's just not that engaging.
|
| Most of the time there's a minute or two where the first slide
| is up but everyone is still getting settled. The less engaging
| info can be on that first slide and when the talk starts you
| can skip ahead to the second slide without discussing that
| first one.
| time-less-ness wrote:
| When I present, I just go through the introductory stuff at
| lightspeed. Who am I? Why am I here? What do I do? What is the
| history of this topic? Why should you care? All that takes about
| 30 seconds. If you aren't talking like Ben Shapiro for this bit,
| you're talking too slow.
| soared wrote:
| Maybe a good way to trim off unnecessary context but for
| presentations I've done on concepts novel to the audience, the
| context is critical for understanding. Skipping to some meat then
| giving context just produces more confusion. I much prefer
| leading with "why does my audience care".
|
| They don't care about context - but I like literally saying "you
| should care about this because X" or "after this presentation you
| will be able to do Y". That engages people and focuses your
| presentation on the lens of audience's needs rather than yours.
| Then context is reasonable as they're hooked and want to know
| where you're going.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| I always start a technical presentation with "spoilers", for
| anyone who is busy or is happy to just trust me, they can leave
| almost immediately with the most important bit of information.
| Anyone else who wants disagree, or wants proof any claims can get
| involved.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, the inverted pyramid[1] is almost always a good pattern
| when conveying important information. Not only do you end up
| telling people why they should care first, the less interesting
| stuff ends up at the end, so if you run over time (or someone
| zones out), they aren't missing much.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
| hackernewds wrote:
| In practice, this ends up with attendees interrupting with
| pointless questions that are covered in the next slides
| anamexis wrote:
| I think that is an invariant of presentations
| eisenman wrote:
| This tracks with the product demo idea of 'do the last thing
| first'. No need to make the audience 'earn' the payoff - just
| skip right to the good stuff and then go over the rest for the
| folks that care. (This and much more from reviews of a whole
| bunch of demos here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220126051034
| /https://www.secon...)
| floatrock wrote:
| Similar to BLUF -- Bottom Line Up Front.
|
| Hear that one used more for memos or emails, but same concept.
| Give people a sense of what's at the end so they see where the
| background is going. Use the story-spine if you want, but show
| a trailer to convince the audience there's some juicy
| explosion-ladden scenes at the end of the rainbow.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Depends on the audience. I've seen presentations to Director-
| and-VP types that wouldn't progress past the first (fact
| summary) slide. You'll present a nice summary of your results
| with the high level conclusions, and someone will open their
| mouth and say "Well, what about Detail X that I heard about?
| How did you account for that?" and you say "We'll get to
| that, it's actually explained on slide 6." "Well, I heard
| through Dave that..." now you have to either discuss it
| immediately without the slide's context, or awkwardly scroll
| to slide 6 for the guy. Then some other exec pipes in with
| "But, my team's component Y was not included here at all!"
| and you say, "That's slide 3. I was planning on that being my
| first topic, but we got side tracked with Detail X..." Then
| the original exec "Speaking of Detail X, what about SubDetail
| Z, which I notice you left off [the summary slide]..."
| Uggghhhhh kill me now.
| alexthehurst wrote:
| Those execs sound like terrible communicators. It's hard
| for me to imagine a colleague acting this way in real life.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Oh, it's real, and goes down exactly as GP describes.
| bityard wrote:
| If you've never had a co-worker or manager interrupt you
| mid-sentence to breathlessly ask you a question that is
| literally answered by the second half of the sentence you
| were GOING to finish, then my friend you should go buy a
| lottery ticket because this happens to me daily, in every
| job I have ever had in the last 20 years in tech.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> If you 've never had a co-worker or manager interrupt
| you mid-sentence_
|
| I've had plenty of people interrupt me to ask questions
| while I'm presenting - which I think is generally
| something to be encouraged.
|
| When I've replied with "That's a very insightful
| question, we'll get to the answer in a few slides time"
| I've never had someone insist on continuing the
| interruption.
| orf wrote:
| Exactly, this is how you do it.
| albert_e wrote:
| I have been in some meetings where the "big boss" cannot
| follow any structure and will constantly throw out ideas
| and enquiries and demand we had ready answers for
| questions we are hearing for the first time or topic that
| was not on the agenda and pontificate about how some
| things should be better etc.
|
| Thankfully they only attended our meetings once a quarter
| and never involved in matters beyond pontification.
| cess11 wrote:
| As a presenter in that situation you should tell them to
| shut it or leave, and take notes so they remember the
| questions they have for after the presentation.
|
| If they refuse to comply, leave.
| squigz wrote:
| This seems like a great way to speedrun losing your job.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I'm gonna tell my boss's boss's boss's boss to "shut
| it or leave." That's a bold strategy, Cotton, lets see if
| it pays off...
| cess11 wrote:
| It's not a loss if management consists of a bag of dicks.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| No, I'm pretty sure that it's a loss to not have income
| coming in while you scramble to find a new job.
| wrs wrote:
| In a previous life where I did a lot of presentations to
| Bill Gates, I had the opposite problem. He insisted on
| having the presentation printed out for him ahead of time,
| and he would usually have read and understood them (no idea
| when he would have time to do that). So you'd be on slide 2
| going through your careful introduction, and he would ask
| an uncomfortable question about something on slide 12!
|
| The Amazon method of starting with quiet reading may be the
| only solution...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I do that with all the blog articles I write: start with a
| summary, with full reusable code you can copy/paste when
| appropriate.
|
| That's what I want from others, so that's what I do.
|
| Let the ego aside, be useful.
| albert_e wrote:
| Isn't this the PPT version of this movie trope?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
| ska wrote:
| It's used in some movies _also_ , but the idea predates movies
| by millennia :)
| hackernewds wrote:
| No need to be snarky :)
| kleiba wrote:
| Correct.
|
| This technique really seemed to have been very popular in
| main stream cinema around 5 to 2 years ago, I think. So much
| so that my best buddy developed a kind of aversion to "3
| hours earlier" etc. being displayed across the screen after
| the opening act.
| cseleborg wrote:
| This very technique is why I loved Salman Khan's teaching videos
| on Khan Academy so much. On any topic, he goes straight to the
| content, no intro whatsoever.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Sally Bhai never misses a beat. Khan Academy has been a
| generational change for education
| davidkunz wrote:
| Like in video games: Show the door before the key.
| seidleroni wrote:
| As the article mentions, this is also used by authors. I went to
| a book signing for Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of House of
| Leaves and he mentioned that for his books, he always ends up
| throwing out the beginning of the book.
| jerf wrote:
| More generally, you should view presentations as stories.
| Obviously not stories presented solely for their drama as one
| might watch a movie, but the fundamental "conflict -> tension
| raising -> resolution" cycle ought to be in your presentation,
| multiple times as needed just as they nest within a traditional
| story.
|
| It is tempting to the technical mind to present them as we see
| mathematical proofs, building from the fundamentals up to the
| final result in a completely-temporally-ordered manner, but the
| reasons that works in a math text don't apply to presentations.
| And a lot of people don't find it all that useful in math texts
| intended for learning either, if you read one of HN's periodic
| discussions of "how we learn math best".
|
| This post is basically to use the "start with a hook" approach to
| story telling, which is a good option. There are others, but
| there's a reason so many good stories-for-the-sake-of-stories use
| this approach. In general if people are showing up to your
| presentation voluntarily, you do have a couple of slides you can
| use to build some tension up before they'll zone out on you, but
| you do want to get to your first "conflict" fairly quickly.
|
| This is pretty abstract, so let me give a specific technical
| example to show what I mean. It's been a while now since pretty
| much everyone knows git, but for a while I was the _de facto_ git
| trainer in my company. I had a prepared presentation I used for
| this, and I had the people in the presentation follow along,
| running commands in a local repo they create on the spot. I did
| not immediately start with a hook; I did start with general
| overview of git and how it works, but on what would be the fourth
| slide or so, rather than take them through nothing but the happy
| path, I start getting them into trouble, detaching the head.
| Everyone detaches head sooner or later without meaning to. This
| is the conflict & tension, and the resolution is, how do we
| solve this problem? The rest of the presentation does not just
| guide through the happy paths, but periodically either gets them
| into one of the common error states or walks them through a
| common pitfall by not just warning them about it, but taking them
| through the process of getting into various common troubles and
| then getting out of it.
|
| Each of these cycles is an implicit story, where the main
| character gets into trouble, as appropriate the trouble gets
| worse, then the trouble is resolved. Obviously no one would go to
| a movie theater to watch someone get stuck in git and then get
| unstuck; it is not that kind of story. Programming and hacking
| get dressed up the way they do by Hollywood for a reason; the
| real thing is unwatchably boring. But it still has the story
| cycle in it. You can also spice you presentations up by showing
| some of the wrong paths you encountered or the problems you had
| to solve instead of just presenting the bare results; in addition
| to being more compelling in the abstract, such presentations are
| more valuable anyhow in a lot of other ways.
|
| This is far more effective then a standard dead presentation that
| just shows "how to do this. how to do that. how to do the other
| thing. now you know things go forth and do" while the audience's
| eyes glaze over.
| drewcoo wrote:
| I agreed with a lot of that except this:
|
| > set some context and then present the problem to be solved
|
| And this is exactly why:
|
| > Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it
|
| Addressing an audience of programmers is already like herding
| cats. Giving them a problem they can each individually try to
| solve instead of paying attention to the presentation is counter-
| productive.
|
| If you absolutely have to tease the problem, consider doing it in
| the invitation to the presentation so that they can work through
| the problem before showing up.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| In other words, a 'record scratch' narrative structure
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/record-scratch-freeze-frame-y...
| agumonkey wrote:
| Some people argue that it's becoming the norm for youtube
| videos too. People start with in action introduction and later
| on intersperse background details with outcomes.
| felixhummel wrote:
| So basically: in medias res
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res
| rdlw wrote:
| Yes, the subtitle of the article is "AKA in media res"
| tomrod wrote:
| Isn't this just the STAR comms model?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_task,_action,_resul...
| robomartin wrote:
| In my opinion, Professor Patrick Winston's lecture (MIT) is
| likely in the top-5 when it come to advice on how to give
| presentations. I have used his framework multiple times, for both
| technical and business presentations in groups of a few to
| hundreds of people and have always had good results. Well worth
| watching.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY
| tqwhite wrote:
| Absolutely. Do this. I speak as a person with a long lifetime of
| public speaking behind me.
|
| Also, do this if you have to write a memo or a paper. I very
| often swap, or repeat, the last paragraph to the beginning.
| jjslocum3 wrote:
| For me the real nugget is the first comment:
|
| "Programmers have a pavlovian engineering response. Pose them a
| problem and they'll start trying to solve it."
| bityard wrote:
| Ah, Nerd Sniping: https://xkcd.com/356/
| codazoda wrote:
| "I'm okay, the bull is dead", for presentations.
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/1702433/i-m-ok-the-bul...
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > "Please, God, kill me now."
|
| Who among us hasn't had that exact reaction?
| asalahli wrote:
| While I get the point made in the article, I'd prefer being
| told "I hit a bull with my car. I'm ok, but the car is damaged"
| first, rather than having fed bits and pieces of info slowly,
| or worse, having to fish it out.
|
| It's understandable for people to not be calm in this situation
| and struggle to explain things clearly, but it sounds like that
| wasn't the case here. So if you _are_ calm, do the other person
| a favor and give a 10-15 second explanation of what happened
| instead of leaving them guessing.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Presenting is hard. Know your audience.
|
| Some need an introduction. Others might not.
| jedberg wrote:
| A technical presentation still needs a story. This is standard
| storytelling technique -- you start with the inciting event, the
| hook that gets you interested.
|
| How does The Matrix start? With Trinity about to get caught.
| Bambi? Mom gets shot. Star Wars? A tiny ship is getting chased by
| a huge ship with lasers.
|
| A good tech presentation follows good storytelling: 1) Inciting
| event, build to a semi-climax, pull back a little, hit the
| climax, then conclusion.
|
| If you want to be a great technical presenter, read some books on
| telling good stories. :)
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes, although I think you have to be careful not to piss
| audiences off with that technique. E.g. think of those too-long
| form articles that start "<Interesting hook and then...> David
| lives in a 3 bedroom house in rural blah with his two dogs,
| boopy and bloppy...". Instant close.
|
| I did an amazing presentation course once run by a comedian. He
| was very very good, and the main advice that stuck with me was
| to have your presentation follow the hero's tale. Everyone
| knows it: all is good, tragedy strikes, problem is overcome,
| celebrate.
|
| You might think that you can't fit technical talks into that
| format, and I wouldn't say _every_ presentation needs to be
| like that. But it 's applicable way more often than you'd
| think.
|
| Basically anything that solves a problem can be told like this.
| But too many presentations are like "I'm going to tell you
| about the X project. Here's an overview of the slides. Right,
| what is X?" instead of "We have a lot of things that do Y. This
| all worked great until Z, then disaster! Existing solution A
| doesn't work at all for this case. So we created X. But it
| didn't work because ... so we had to do ..., and finally
| everything worked!"
| gretch wrote:
| > I think you have to be careful not to piss audiences off
| with that technique. E.g. think of those too-long form
| articles that start "<Interesting hook and then...> David
| lives in a 3 bedroom house in rural blah with his two dogs,
| boopy and bloppy...". Instant close.
|
| I would say that's because the example is the antithesis of
| the advice given.
|
| In this case, I don't know who David is, I don't care. Why
| are you telling me about him.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Bambi starts off with him being born - his mother doesn't die
| til the middle of the movie.
| jedberg wrote:
| Fascinating, you're absolutely right! Apparently I'm not the
| only one who got it wrong:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/8w0ewm/me_an.
| ..
| btbuildem wrote:
| I've read all the sentences in all the paragraphs, but I'm still
| not sure what OP was trying to convey. Are they saying "skip the
| introduction"?
|
| I try to start my presentations with a quick rundown of what the
| presentation will consist of. You can't always tailor the content
| to the audience, but you can at least give them an index/coles
| notes up front, so they know when to pay attention and when to
| zone out.
| blowski wrote:
| 1. Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em.
|
| 2. Tell 'em.
|
| 3. Tell 'em what you told 'em.
|
| There should be 2 or 3 key points that you reinforce multiple
| times. No more.
|
| And my #1 tip: The more natural you want the presentation to
| sound, the more you need to practice it in advance.
|
| If you're an experienced presenter you'll know how and when to
| break these rules.
| IshKebab wrote:
| This is such bad advice because it leads to tedious contents
| pages that people read out _twice_. You shouldn 't need to do
| more than tell people what problem you're trying to solve,
| and you definitely shouldn't need to tell people what you
| just told them. You just told them! If they don't know what
| you told them then you didn't do a very good job.
|
| Seriously no good presentation I've ever seen has followed
| this tedious format.
|
| Definitely agree about practice though. Makes a huge
| difference.
|
| Also record yourself with a phone. Closest feeling you can
| get to a real audience.
| pricechild wrote:
| I don't think it is. It's a commonly taught technique to
| flight instructors and I personally think it does often
| work.
|
| Not saying it applies in all situations.
|
| I think it does depend on narrowly scoping the
| presentation.
| ajcp wrote:
| > tell people what problem you're trying to solve
|
| That's literally step one in OPs advice. It's just a pat
| way of conveying the "introduction > argument > summary"
| format for presenting and it scales really well from 3
| slides to x.
|
| 1. This problem I'm trying to solve (i.e. I'm going to tell
| you how I solved this problem - Tell 'em what you're gonna
| tell 'em) 2. This is how I solved the problem (Tell 'em) 3.
| This is the outcome (i.e. This is what the solved problem
| looks like - Tell 'em what you told 'em)
| flerchin wrote:
| 1. Tell 'em.
| beryilma wrote:
| Absolutely not. Please don't do this. Treat your audience as
| smart people and just tell them. All that pseudo-psychology
| just doesn't work with presentations.
| henry_pulver wrote:
| My understanding of the key point of this blog is:
|
| > Instead of explaining the technical background first so
| listeners understand the solution to a problem, start with the
| problem. Then explain the context/technical background second
| bbor wrote:
| They've invented the "motivation" of a text. Reinvented,
| obviously!
| bluishgreen wrote:
| Related: Millennial Pause
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EVHLBdZ6Oxw
| jll29 wrote:
| My recommendation is: start with an image (no text) on the first
| slide. It is important that the image has seemingly nothing to do
| with the topic of the talk that was on the (unnumbered) title
| slide.
|
| Now people are curious what explanation you are giving, and are
| paying attention.
|
| After resolving the mystery, you can move on to the second slide,
| you can give e.g. a problem statement or research question and
| then follow with the usual structure (outline, method, data,
| experiments, evaluation results, discussion and limitations,
| summary, conclusions and future work.
|
| Caveat: This works only for oral presentations; there is an
| important type of slide deck with is the predominant type in
| large international corporations, and it's a mix between PPT
| presentation and Word document, where slides are full of text so
| that the deck is self-explanatory. Those are written not just to
| be presented but MOSTLY for being passed around by email to be
| read. They intentionally violate all the rules of good slide
| decks to accompany good presentations, because they are mainly
| used to summarize e.g. a new business case for senior management,
| who may never listen to the presentation, but who may browse the
| slides.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| The best presentations, just like the best literature, tells a
| good story.
|
| It takes character and personality to tell a good story. You
| can't lie to the audience. They will know right away if you are
| lying.
|
| And lying in this case is okay as long as the story is good.
| Presentations should be about getting people to think and
| reflect, it should not be about what the author believes.
|
| Slide one or two. Doesn't matter. Tell a story with a whole heart
| or don't try. Don't fake it. Give it all. Empty out or don't try.
| beryilma wrote:
| Government presentations are the worst, including the likes of
| NASA, NIH, etc. Extremely overcrowded slides, the logo of the
| institution on EVERY slide, equations all over the place, no care
| for providing value to the audience. This gave rise to the
| assertion-evidence style of presentions, which sound right on the
| surface but it has also been taken to another extreme where every
| slide tries to use the approach. My single concern for my
| presentations is to provide value to the audience; this usually
| fixes a lot of stupid presentation content...
| godelski wrote:
| I've gotten a lot of training on presentations while in grad
| school and my former advisor used to often quiz us during our
| practices.
|
| One thing is to treat the first slide as a kinda holding place
| while you're not talking. Like the cover of a book, and nothing
| more.
|
| One of the things he would do to "trick" us is introduce us in
| various ways. The two common ways would be And
| our next speaker will discuss BlahBlah
|
| To which you respond Thanks SoAndSo. I'm Godelski
| and I'll be discussing *next slide* BlahBlah
|
| The other is And our next speaker is Godelski and
| he'll be presenting his work on BlahBlah
|
| Which you respond with Thanks SoAndSo. *next
| slide*
|
| There's a few variations (including no introduction) and they're
| all formulated in this way that you don't repeat the information
| from the person introducing you and you move away from your
| TitlePlaceholder Slide quickly. It is only there for saying who
| you are and what the talk is about. If any more information is to
| be conveyed to the audience, you should not be on that slide.
|
| There's also a lot more to what goes into the slides and how to
| organize them but that's less general. Other than I think it is
| quite helpful to have outline slides even if they're only seen
| for <1 second (often more important because slides get posted
| online. I like to use slides for talking so they don't post well
| online and I wish when they were it was easy to include slide
| notes. This works fine for Google slides but not PDFs. Maybe
| someone can push for a new paradigm here. I feel like we could
| likely do this with beamer, if it is not already done).
| riiii wrote:
| The first slide is the book cover. Guess what, people _do_ judge
| a book by it 's cover.
| niebeendend wrote:
| SCQA - https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/executive-
| communicati...
| analog31 wrote:
| >>>> Now the first chapter starts with a gun pointed at the
| hero's head. By the end, he is teetering on a cliff about to jump
| into a crocodile-infested river. Just when the tension reaches a
| peak, we're introduced to the character but we have reason to
| want to get to know him.
|
| Amusingly, every _New Yorker_ article is structured in this way,
| but with a twist: The character and not the action is actually
| the main subject matter.
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