• If you’re giving a research presentation that has an abstract component, start with a concrete example of the benefit that adopting the abstract method will give the audience. Audiences love both concrete examples and a clear understanding of the benefits that listening to a long explanation of something might bring them.
• Corrollary: DON’T start with a research methodology or description of the system, unless you want your audience to fall asleep.
• Be careful about using video in presentations. Any momentum that you might have built up in your presentation evaporates when you show video: video has its own rhythm and pace, different than yours. If the video is good enough, go ahead and use it, but realize that you’ll have to start over again momentum-wise.
• If you’re asking your audience to focus their eyes on slides, then don’t be afraid of moving around the room while you do so. I frequently hop off the stage and roam around the room if I’m going through slides. It keeps people in the audience on their toes and allows you to share their point-of-view.

More to come on this.

If you run a Google search on the phrase “two minutes per slide” you’ll quickly find yourself on a circa 1997 web page called “Oral Presentation Advice” by Professor Mark D. Hill of the Computer Science Department University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Here’s one relevant sentence: “This conference talk outline is a starting point, not a rigid template. Most good speakers average two minutes per slide (not counting title and outline slides), and thus use about a dozen slides for a twenty minute presentation.”

Somehow this advice — which may very well work for computer science presentations, although I doubt it — has managed to sneak its way out of comp-sci and into presentations that people are giving at conferences and in classrooms all over the world. This is sad news because two minutes per slide is at least 90 seconds too long if you’re trying to hold an audience’s attention in a dark room, particularly after lunch. However, if you’re trying to help people fall asleep, then this rule is effective.

I give a lot of talks and I’m trying to work out my own Powerpoint rules, so as I think about them I’ll share them here. Like a bludgeon, Powerpoint is a blunt but effective tool if you know how to use it.

Here are my first thoughts:

• If you put the same slide up on the screen for two minutes, then the people in your audience will stop listening to anything you have to say for as long as it takes them to read the slide. You’ll never get them back into the same rhythm again.
• Two minutes of data probably requires eight slides at minimum.
• You need to parsimoniously hand out a new slide with each new bit of data. That let’s you control the pace and rhythm of the talk.
• Don’t use any of the animations that Powerpoint makes so easy. If you’re an animated speaker, then you don’t need them. If you aren’t, they won’t help you. At all. Powerpoint animations are the public speaking equivalent of thinking that a weird font and unusual color will make your writing better.
• Don’t read your slides. The slides are a prop, an illustration, something that you, the speaker, are in dialogue with. If you simply read the slides, then why does your audience need you? Most of them probably know how to read already.

P.S. If you don’t believe me about this — and if you’d like to read a devastating critique of Powerpoint when it comes to depthfully dealing with data — check out Edward Tufte’s classic essay, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.” It’s worth the $7.00.