Presenting at a Conference

As my daughters grow up I hope to teach them the skills necessary to speak in front of a public audience.  I'm an introvert so I'm not all that comfortable speaking in front of an audience, but ironically I'm a teacher and speak in front of an audience every day!!!  Every once in awhile I speak at a conference.  When I do so, I go to great lengths to prepare myself for my presentation.  I even practice it ahead of time out loud so that I know if my presentation is too short or too long given the allotted time.  I know I'm not a perfect speaker, but because of the effort I place into my own talks, I expect others to do the same.  I have a very high standard for conference presenters.

Conference presenters are a crap shoot.  Some are excellent and you can tell that they spent considerable time preparing.  Others simply choose to wing it, and the resulting talk is horrible.  Here are a few pointers for future conference presenters.

1.  Don't ever say "this should be pretty short, leaving plenty of time for discussion".  When I hear these words, I know the presenter has no clue how long his or her talk will last.  Nearly every time I've heard this, the presenter goes OVER the allotted time.  This is very frustrating.

2.  Don't go over the allotted time.  Don't treat your audience as if what you have to say is SOOO important that others should re-arrange their schedules for you!  Trust me, your audience tuned out long ago and is simply waiting for the pain to end.

3.  Don't prepare 75 PowerPoint slides for a 15 minute talk.  It's amazing how often this happens.  There's nothing wrong with PowerPoint, but how do you not know that 5 slides per minute is way too much?  Inevitably, the presenter is on slide 7 after 15 minutes and then plows through the remaining 68 slides in 5 minutes, leaving the audience utterly confused.

4.  Don't present a table or graph in 8 point font.  No one in the front row can see your table, let alone the back row.

5.  Practice your talk ahead of time!!!  It's obvious when the presenter hasn't practiced his or her talk ahead of time.  The speaking is choppy and the presenter has no plan or outline to focus on.

I used to sit through bad talks because I felt bad about leaving the room.  I'd watch others leave and think "that's pretty rude".   However, I've come to the conclusion that if I leave, I'm not the one being rude.  The presenter is the one being rude for wasting my time on utter nonsense.  I wasted my time on a speaker who was unprepared when there was probably another, much better, session that I could have attended.

My daughters are too young to learn the finer points of public speaking, but it's on my list of things to teach them when they are older.