Thank you all for coming, and welcome to today's presentation, "a quick talk about quick talks." I got the idea for this talk when I started getting feedback from some Shortcutters who told me that they're interested in doing a lighting talk at the Shortcut summit, but don't know where to begin, or what sort of topic to choose that will be interesting for listeners. Some people simply have little or no public speaking experience and want to change that. Hopefully, today's talk will help fill in some gaps for some of you Today’s talk will be recorded, and at the end of this presentation I will give you a link to the full text of this presentation for future reference.
Let me start off by saying that I'm not some sort of absolute expert when it comes to giving presentations. I'd say that I've given a few dozen different talks, at employers and clients, at local user groups and at conferences. But over the years I've watched hundreds of them. In doing so, I've noticed patterns and taken notes, and today I've tried to boil down some of my observations into six guidelines that I think can help you in creating presentations that are interesting and memorable. For those of you who have already signed up to do a presentation at our Shortcut summit, I hope these guidelines will help you refine and clarify your messages. For those of you that haven't signed up to do one yet, I hope that this will help you think of topics you might want to share with the rest of us.
- (1: talking) In a lightning talk, the most important ingredient is talking. It's a talk, not a slideshow! Of course you can have slides, and you probably should have slides, but they should be secondary. Ideally, most of your talk should be useful and meaningful even if there's a power outage and you can't show any slides at all. Most of the talks that I do, I first write down as paragraphs or a script, and only add slides after I've got the structure worked out.
- (2: story) And usually, that structure is that of a story. Your talk should include a little introduction so that your audience hears what the topic is, and gets to know a little about you, and about why you're giving this talk. The meat of the talk should be made up of some knowledge that is presented in a sequence that makes sense. Talk about where you started, what you did that expanded your knowledge and experience, and where you've ended up so far. At the end of your talk, give a little summary that helps people remember the key points of what they just heard. This basic formula can be found throughout literature, films, and so on. If it's good enough for Hollywood, it's good enough for your talk.
- (3: experience) The next point that I want to mention is that your talk should be built around your actual, lived experience. Don't worry if you don't feel like an expert or authority in your topic. The point of your talk is to share your experience, which is unique and valuable even if it seems obvious or trivial to you. Each of us is on their own path of learning and improving, picking up experience and knowledge along the way. For each person in the audience who knows more about your topic than you do, there are probably ten people who haven't come as far as you have, and twenty people who are complete beginners. All of these people can benefit from your learned wisdom.
- (4: details later) The fourth point I want to mention is about details. All of us are working with complex technologies, and it can be hard to convey all of the details you want to share in a short amount of time. It's tempting to load your slides with lots of complexity to share your ideas, but I'd advise against that, especially for something short like a lightning talk. If your talk touches on many complicated details, let the audience know in advance that you will supply them with a link at the end of your talk to find these details. That way, they don't feel concerned about trying to take extensive notes or to memorize all the stuff you're putting on screen. It's important to include that link at the end of your talk, so that people in the audience don't start browsing this material while you're still talking! I'd suggest putting it on the last slide, so that it can stay on screen long enough for people to make a note of it or take a picture. Please use a URL shortener to make a convenient link that can be displayed in a large font, so it's easy to read.
- (5: do repeat yourself) The fifth guideline is this: Do repeat yourself. Within software development, we have the concept of DRY: don't repeat yourself. That's ideal for a codebase, but when it comes to getting a message across, repeating yourself can be very useful. It doesn't mean that you need to say the same things in the same exact way, over and over again. But using different sets of words to say basically the same thing more than once can help trigger a few different pathways in your listeners' brains, and make it more likely that things actually sink in.
- (6: practice out loud) The sixth and final point that I want to suggest for you is to practice your talk out loud. This serves three purposes: First, it will let you measure how long the talk takes, which is important because in many cases, such as our Summit, you will have a time limit for your talk. Even if you don't have a hard time limit for a talk you're giving in some other context, it can be useful to know whether all the words you mean to say fill up fifteen minutes or fifty minutes. Second, practicing it out loud will help you find spots where you've written things that seem fine in writing but don't work so well in a talk. You might find yourself writing words that look fine but feel strange coming out of your mouth. Or you might write in long sentences that are easy to read silently but leave you breathless when you try to speak them. Practicing out loud can help you find these problems. The third benefit of practicing out loud is that the more you do it, the more comfortable you will become with saying all the things you want to say, which will make your talk go more smoothly.
So, to wrap up, I've summarized these six guidelines as shown here: Talking, Story, Experience, Details Later, Do Repeat Yourself, Practice Out Loud. Thank you all for coming, I hope this has been helpful to some of you. And, as promised, here's a link to the full text of this talk. The video from today will be shared later, and of course if you have any questions or comments for me right now, I think we have some time.
Very quick and informative! Thank you!