Slightly off topic … “Where Not To Give A Presentation”
During a recently holiday over in the US I was enjoying an evening meal with friends at a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Kissimmee, FL.
Unfortunately the atmosphere was disturbed by the arrival of a salesman and customer a few tables away. Once seated the salesman started going through his pitch with the sort of scripted, racing, loud delivery designed for a conference room. He even insisted on setting up his laptop and running through the product at the table in front of the customer. The product, by the way, was some sort of web application building framework. The general low level hum of the diners faded into the background as phrases containing “browser” and “properties” and “you can do this” and “right click on this” bounced off the walls.
Perhaps it is my English reserve, but I found this annoying, and it was probably that same reserve that stopped me from going over and slamming the laptop shut. Furthermore, had I been the customer I would have felt embarassed in this situation, but he seemed to be quite content to disrupt the meals of all the other paying customers.
Still, it could have been worse. They could have set up in the restrooms!
I’ve found your blog by searching for VSLive and I like the varying topics and agree with your criticisms towards certain speakers. Anyway, I’m searchnig for VSLive because I’ve never attended the conference before. The reason I’m interested in the conference is because PDC 07 has been canceled. Boooo!
That being said, I’ve attended Borland conferences in the past and they have been very informative. They’ve offered plenty of tracks, and more importantly, several classes that address varying skill levels.
The VSLive site isn’t very informative but that seems to be true with most Microsoft information I’m finding. From your perspective, will it be worthwhile to attend a VSLive conference and what should I expect there?
The “3 T’s” style is largely misused because those who use it don’t think about why they’re doing it when they’re doing it.
There’s basicly two very different uses.
There are occasions where the audience doesn’t necessarily know very well what it is that they are about to hear, and so it’s usually best to tell the general subject before starting, so the audience doesn’t spend the first crucial minutes (which very often has the most important stuff which is referred to later in the presentation) trying to get what you’re actually trying to talk about. In this case the context needs to be set up explicitly enough, so for example if the subject is, “Homosexuality in British Boarding Schools in the 19th century”, it’s best not to just call it “Queer Sex”, even if that’d be shorter.
The other use is to pound the point in, but if that’s the case, you should once again be explicit about what you want to pound in. So not “I used to be a mercenary and I’m going to talk about the effect of torture techniques”, but “I’m going to talk about why torture mostly doesn’t work, and I know this stuff because I did it professionally for different governments for around twenty years”.
Huge difference in setting the tone and preparing the listeners, and if this imaginary mercenary dude is really trying to convince for example some politicians that torture generally just isn’t worth it, but sets it up like in the first example, the first question after the presentation will propably be “so what techniques would you recommend?”
Unfortunately the guy giving the presentation can often only explain that “he’s going to talk about x”, and that’s because he never really thought about what should be in it, because for him the presentation is “stuff I should tell / want to tell about X”, and he propably just finished working on it in his hotel room that same day, if not 5 minutes before the presentation.
This is just a part of “everything is mostly done in a rush by people who don’t understand, haven’t really thought about it and don’t even care”.
"Tell 'em what you’re going to tell 'em."
Knowing that it’ll be repeated, most’ll ignore this totally. If you’re lucky, some might listen, but will immediately assume that this is the sum of the entire talk and switch off.
"Tell 'em."
This is the point where someone might feasibly listen to you, as long as you’re interesting. Unfortunately, as you’re repeating yourself, you’re no longer interested in what you’re saying, and that’ll rub off.
"Tell 'em what you told 'em."
By now everybody’ll be wondering what’s for lunch, and might as well go to the canteen and find out for all the good it’ll do.
Possibly a better slogan would be:
“Tell 'em”
“Show 'em”
“Ask 'em”
I love this article. I’m in college and I get so frustrated with the poor presentation skill of my fellow students. The biggest one? #5. It makes me wonder just what the presenter is trying to do. Do they think we made it this far into college but we can’t read?