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How-To Impress
An Introduction to Giving
Talks and Presentations
Adam John Trickett
www.iredale.net
adam.trickett@iredale.net
PGP Key: 0x166C4BF0
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Basic
Principles
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Research
• Gap analysis first
• What does the audience already know?
• What do I know?
• Where will the talk go?
• Make notes
• Think it through several times before you start
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Preparation
• All talks need a structure
• Visual aids?
• Written notes?
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Presentation
• Stay calm
• Take a deep breath before you start
• Most audiences are friendly
• Speak clearly with an even pace
• Move about a little
• Stay on time
• Have fun
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Presentation's
Structure
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Beginning
• Introduce
• Yourself
• Title of the talk
• A feel of where you intend to go
• Talk structure if it's long or complex
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Middle
• The content
• Broken into logical chunks
• In a logical order
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End
• Summarise the content
• Reinforce the message
• Conclude where you said you would
• Thank your audience and ask for questions
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Visual Aids?
• Short talks do not usually need visual aids
• The slides are aids not the script
• Keep them simple and focused
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Written Notes?
• Reading out written notes is usually very dull to
listen to
• When speaking without notes it's easy to miss
something
• Turning the page can help pace the talk
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Slides
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KISS
• Simple colour scheme
• Large clear font
• One concept per slide
• 3 or 4 bullet points per slide
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No!
• Animations
• Transitions
• Multi-colour text
• Multi-font text
• Clip art and background images
• Unexplained content
• Over long slides
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This is a very bad slide
• This slide has a lot of nasty things
going on
• However it's fairly typical in the
corporate world
• Too many things in once place is
really annoying
• I'd be amazed if anyone can read this
• It's really very bad isn't it
• Notice the deliberate misspellikg
• Even the clip art looks
rubbish with a white
background
• This point doesn't even fit properly Distributed under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence.
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Good Slide
This is a simple point
●
Things stand-out if everything is simple
●
There is nothing confusing
●

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Resources
• http://www.iredale.net/p/by-type/talk/
• http://www.hants.lug.org.uk/
• http://www.slideshare.net/
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In Summary
• Plan • KISS
• Prepare • Less is More
• Present • Relax and Enjoy
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Thank You
Any
Questions?
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