Only the echoes of my mind

[austin_dern]

Sunny morning, monsoon afternoon. Localized flooding. It's my busy day so no chance to look for squirrels anyway.

Presentations today. Lots of them. This is probably a first draft for a note I'm going to send out, but -- everyone giving presentations, some advice:

1. Aim short. Time moves faster on-stage than you realize. Don't worry about falling under the ``ten minutes'' given for the talk; when's the last time you were upset someone speaking ended early?
2. Don't be afraid of silence. Have a good idea what the end of your sentence is before you start speaking. A little silence is better than a wending, twisting sentence whose beginning is forgotten and whose end can't be guessed.
3. You can fit one big, interesting thought in about five minutes, if you include the necessary surrounding material. You can not present six big, interesting thoughts in a ten-minute talk.
4. Bring a watch. If you can't bring a watch, look carefully at the person in charge for signals that you are running long, including but not limited to: slashing motions across the neck; holding up the hand in a ``stop traffic'' motion; tapping at a wristwatch or where a wristwatch would go; a stern look and a head shaking no when you say something like ``Now I'd like to talk about...''; and gathering a tranquilizer dart and butterfly net.
5. You are not transparent. When you write something on the board or put it on an overhead slide get out of the way so the audience can see it. For that matter walk around the entire stage area; it's better for your diction and more interesting for your audience and it gives the people in back an occasional clear line of sight.
6. When you write something on the board or put up a slide, leave it there. Leave it there long as you possibly can, in fact. If you must remove it, count to thirty before you remove a slide. Too much motion like that leaves it impossible for the audience to understand whatever is presented. And please don't do that thing of covering up the lower three-quarters of a slide. It irritates me more than whiplash slide changes do.
7. If you want to move your hands to show the progression of something, remember to move your hands from your right to your left. The audience sees you moving left to right. This is a tiny thing, but it adds considerably to your apparent professionalism, and the odd thing about public speaking is faking skill is as good as actually having skill.
8. Talk a little too loud. It makes you speak slower and be easier to hear in back. As a bonus, your voicebox will probably tire so you won't go on too long. Bring a caramel to chew afterwards.
9. Do a second and third draft of your outline. Some people can roll out of bed and give a great talk; ordinary mortals need the organization. It's the second draft around you see what the focus should be, and the third draft that you figure how to set it up so you end on the most interesting, delightful point. Public speaking is a dramatic presentation; avoid anticlimax.
10. Practice dropping your voice several dozen decibels when you notice yourself starting to say ``uhm'' and ``uh''. If the audience doesn't hear it it doesn't exist, and again, you look more professional.

What do you think, sirs?

Trivia: A crescent slice of latex glued onto Robin Williams's right eyelid was used to remind him to keep Popeye's ``squinky'' eye squinked during filming. Source: The Popeye Story, Bridget Terry.

Currently Reading: Journey To The Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer, Eldon C. Hall.

Comments

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

Pretty Good except #6. I know I had to do the cover the slide and slowly reveal cause I didn't have the fundage to purchase seperate transparencies. :)

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I agree. Lots of folks I know do the covered-transparency thing, and it's never bothered me in the slightest. This must be a personal taste thing. Of course, when I lecture I usually don't use pre-made transparencies anyway. I use the transparency roll and a wet-erase pen and I just scribble as I go. My theory is that it helps me pace my talking if I have to let my writing catch up, and it gives all the obsessive note-takers time to write everything down too, so I won't get a chorus of "wait! Back up!" whenever I change a slide.

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love the dry-erase boards. :D Untill someone uses a magic marker on them. :P But as I only lectured on history/political science, my overheads were usually aids to help visualize the subject such as the maneuverings in the Battle of Tsushima, etc. etc.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I freely admit hiding parts of the slides is my own bias, and I tried to phrase the rule more softly than usual. But it does drive me crazy when someone reveals one line at a time ... particularly when the entire thing, revealed, just didn't have enough drama to be worth the hiding. Plus invariably the slide gets whipped away two seconds after the last line is revealed.

History and philosophy courses probably set themselves up for more dramatic revelations; maths and science ... really, all that's being hidden is more lines of equations, and the students need as much time as you can give to write them down. Building the suspense up to an application of convolution of the force function with the fundamental solution for the Laplacian operator is just being self-indulgent.

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

I know Coati Pal. It's a Baskin Robbins World. It's all good. :)

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

You know, they should have put a slice of latex on the eye of Famous Studios' Popeye. It drives me crazy the way he switches which eye is the bad one, and sometimes even opens both at once.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It was, I believe, in Shamus Culhane's autobiography that I learned Famous Studios, as time went on, made a conscious choice to eliminate everything non-symmetrical in their character designs, right down to keeping symmetric arms and legs as characters walked or moved. This is part of what gave them that charming, lifeless, former-New Jersey-governor-Jim-Florio appearance. I'm not sure if the policy was drifted towards before the last Popeye cartoons, but forgetting the squinky eye would ``help.''