This week, I gave a presentation with Glen Higgins on the Department of Information Technology for the TLT Internship. I prepared for this since February, but it doesn’t feel like that long since we spaced out the work so only a little had to be done at a time (with a possible slight skew towards April). Oddly enough, I just recently gave a presentation in my CSE 300 class – a class devoted to technical writing. The rule for the other presentation was to make an interesting talk that does not eclipse 10 minutes. The TLT presentation was more about the visual aspect – make a website that is appealing to the eye and informative, but also keep to a 15-minute-maximum in the discussion. The major difference: I had much less time to prepare for the CSE 300 talk (which I decided to do about how technology tracks people everywhere), and the audience of the Computer Science talk was less … pressing than that of having your peers & friends, and supervisors watching in TLT. I did make some comparisons between the two, and got useful ideas.
The first: Content is king, but it needs to be worded in a way that hooks people, unlike certain kinds of academic writing. There needs to be an element of “that’s so cool” that comes from your voice, both content and diction. This is true for every presentation, and I’ve found the only way to do this is to actually create every sentence I’m going to say on the spot. It adds originality, and keeps the presentation fresh, and I’m not bound to a script. The trouble with this is losing my pointer to where I am in the presentation, which will inevitably cause a second of silence. Those get shorter each time I present. When I gave the salutatorian speech to my high school graduating class, I left the speech in note form so I can make the sentences naturally, as if conversing. This worked quite well.
The second: Presenting with a partner can make a presentation easier and difficult simultaneously. You only need to know half of the set of content to be discussed, but there needs to be a synergy between both people so no one gets cut off, and the talk is distributed evenly.
The third: Any talk needs to be adaptable. I’m actually borrowing this entirely from my CSE 300 class, where one of the recommendations is to structure your talk or presentation so parts can be added or removed on the spot without breaking the cohesion of the content, and the main point. For example, when Glen and I presented on DoIT, I added the example about WolfieNet automagically (a term used in the Computer Science Jargon File to show a process works, without the low-level details) handing off connected clients to nearby access points when the client is moving to extol what WolfieNet does for the campus. This wasn’t originally planned, but it seemed a good idea at the time.
The last idea: Make sure the purpose is fulfilled; be it to inform, to persuade, or to teach—as long as there is a clearly defined purpose, a presentation may go well.
In addition, this methodology can work in a customer service oriented profession since if a conversation is made interesting, a user will feel personally helped, and thus be happier at the level of support given.
