Ideas and anecdotes from the venerable Matt Griffin
- Find a happy balance between sharing memorized "zingers", and loosely speaking from your knowledge.
- Learning from Ben: he starts off shooting from the hip, loosely organized. Then you can hear him "feel it" - he finds the point he's looking for, and heads straight to it. Then he ends up on a solid point, bringing it home with a clear, concise observation.
- Jazz players on Kind of Blue - how do they improvise? You know the scales so incredibly well that playing the basics fades into your subconscious. It's then that you're freed up to creatively respond to your environment (and the other players).
- On using GIF's: don't leave them up to long - they become a distraction. Also, with your slides and GIFs, create a sub-story for your talk that the audience can enjoy in their peripheral. Images or text that provide a humorous or powerful backup / pun / counterpoint to your speaking points. Related: my one-word slides might be weak for now. Might be a technique to pull out when I'm more experienced.
- Don't just read your slides. Let the audience read for themselves.
- "You've got to know the wording". If you don't know your lines, you might as well give up. There's no substitute for practice.
