How to Give a Good Talk

> Cut the fluff. Especially if you're adhd or other neuro diverse, you need to work to stay on topic. It _might_ help if you write a script, and have someone go through and mark anything off topic. Even if you don't use the script on stage, writing it and having it might anchor you to the topic at hand.

This one depends. I agree with you probably 4 out of 5 times it happens, but that other 20% are probably some of the best, most memorable talks.

> Accents, even heavy ones, aren't much of a problem.

I strongly disagree. I stopped watching Chrome DevTools update videos a few years back because I have difficulty understanding the presenter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOodTLAjPsE

> You don't need to be perfect on stage.

Yes. Focus on giving a talk of value, and reasonably engaging, but don't be afraid to be humble and authentic, and don't try to be a TED-grade smooth salesperson.

See my TED talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=onion+talks

Your donts are all about nervous people lacking experience. But people who are nervous about speaking will read this, recognize themselves and be even less likely to gain the experience to overcome their nerves.

Each of those can be fixed with practice. You don’t need notes or a script, you just need appropriate practice. There are proven methods, many opportunities to practice them and even more people who will help. Most importantly though, it’s okay to screw up when you’re nervous and each of these donts is totally fine. They’re things to work on and reasons to keep practicing with reasonable, skilled speakers.

> I used to dread speaking in public but have come to enjoy it, and all of the above tips have made it easier over time.

I'm just going to drop a quick tip that might be helpful to people with severe anxiety around public speaking: beta blockers (specifically propranolol.) Even when prepared and knowledgeable, and in a small group setting, I often found my leg shaking uncontrollably, and my throat locking up on me, leading to stammering, etc. Beta blockers effectively managed these involuntary symptoms, which also improved my confidence, and vastly improved my presentations, without sedating effects.

These are all great tips, and mirror my admittedly few attempts at public speaking. But one thing that really must be internalized is that, for an hour presentation, you should spend many many hours preparing. If you do this, you will be engaging, cool and calm, and can easily add in humor. Without the preparation you will be stressed and your audience will be bored, or worse, embarrassed for you.

Thanks for reminding me that I have a gist I (occasionally) keep updated with resources like yours. Added to https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837.

point 7 on the q&a slide, very nice. I hadn't heard that one before

I've given a few talks at semi-big conferences, and I've always worked hard on the "entertain" part - I think it's really important.

BUT (and it's a big but), it adds a second axis of subjectvity. Already, I'm out there talking about a thing which I think is "interesting" and "worthy" subject matter of other peoples time. Now, I'm adding "and is delivered in an entertaining way".

For me - that's humour - both in the delivery, and in the slides I show. But - like anything - it doesn't always land.

And, when it doesn't -- it's a very very long awkward talk. I've been on speaking circuts where a conference goes to multiple cities (same country), and the talk went down very well in one city, and bombed in another. Things like timing matter (after lunch sucks).

Also, The author lists the requirements as "inform, educate and entertain" -- and I'd add -- "in that order". I've cut things from my talk because they were funny (IMO), but ultimately didn't support the content of the talk enough. After all -- This is a tech talk, not a standup routine.

All three are very hard to do well -- but I do agree with the author in that's it's the speakers job to do all three.

One point that's important on the "entertain" front is that it doesn't need to mean humour/jokes. More likely it's things like well designed slides, interactive elements like demos or anecdotes to break up technical content.

Humour can work in presentations but it's really hard to pull off well. A lot of jokes rely on things like shared background/experience/cultural touchstones, so tricky to do in a conference where you might not know those things about your audience.

If you do use humour, I'd recommend not making it core to the talk, so if people don't get the jokes, it doesn't ruin the talk for them. Also generally use it sparingly, the odd meme can be funny, one on every slide probably not a great idea.

Andrei Alexandrescu comes to mind as someone who does this often. Plenty of talks on youtube.

I've only given talks to small audiences but they were very well-received. I often focus on humour, partially because I don't really have the background to deep-dive technical material hard enough for that to be interesting in-and-of-itself (maybe this is imposter syndrome).

It is very important though. It's very easy to lose an audience, and the truth is a lot of the speakers before you will likely range from slightly boring to extremely boring. The audience can be primed to totally clock out if you don't grab them immediately and keep them for the whole thing.

There are lots of talks videoed and put on youtube. Cppcon is professionally edited and it shows in quality, others are cell phone in the crowd. Watch a few and you can see plenty of great examples. Almost nobody is singing/dancing, but many are entertaining despite what is ultimately a dry subject

You want to watch a few talks by James Mickens.

I read some advice from an experienced academic about this which stuck with me (unfortunately can't remember who!).

If you want to keep people's attention, make every slide as minimally simple as possible. Like one diagram and maybe a few words. Listing out bullet points of full sentences might feel efficient but it's no better than just saying what you would have written. And lots of text is a lot more glaze-inducing for most of the audience. You can point to supplementary docs for detail.

Another idea is to break up longer talks (30min+) in two with some slides of nice photos you've taken.

It's definitely possible to break the rules. In fact, to give a truly outstanding talk that everyone remembers, you probably have to break the rules (speaking as someone who coded an entire Sigcomm presentation in a 3d game engine). But most early career researchers, for whom this advice is presumably intended, are not good enough at giving talks for that to be a good idea. In fact most tenured professors aren't too. If you do break the rules, you need to have a very clear idea in your head as to how you're going to pull it off, and a good idea of who your audience is and how they'll perceive it, and those are both hard to achieve without a lot of experience.

> The audience cannot care about your work until they understand the ‘value proposition’, to use still more contemporary capitalist jargon.

Hard disagree.

It is easy to imagine a problem that just sounds FUN.

Had great fun with them when I was 16 years old. They brought us to the pub for a few drinks. The good old days.

Feels like a cult, never heard a bad thing about them.

Just my internal guts feeling that probably is wrong.

Be alert for any recommendations to sound more certain than you are.

Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45095849

Please don't. I don't want to hear about your fathers love of swedish joinery for 10 minutes (yes this happened)

Pro-tip: do this for online recipes too. People love it!