How to Give a Good Talk

Listing out the categories of value proposition is useful when considering what to include in a talk, but in my experience, the entertainment part is just as crucial to getting people’s attention. I’d be interested in seeing how people approach entertainment in a technical context and how it can be used to solidify a talk’s main ideas.

There are lots of talks videoed and put on youtube. Cppcon is professionally edited and it shows in quality, others are cell phone in the crowd. Watch a few and you can see plenty of great examples. Almost nobody is singing/dancing, but many are entertaining despite what is ultimately a dry subject

I've given a few talks at semi-big conferences, and I've always worked hard on the "entertain" part - I think it's really important.

BUT (and it's a big but), it adds a second axis of subjectvity. Already, I'm out there talking about a thing which I think is "interesting" and "worthy" subject matter of other peoples time. Now, I'm adding "and is delivered in an entertaining way".

For me - that's humour - both in the delivery, and in the slides I show. But - like anything - it doesn't always land.

And, when it doesn't -- it's a very very long awkward talk. I've been on speaking circuts where a conference goes to multiple cities (same country), and the talk went down very well in one city, and bombed in another. Things like timing matter (after lunch sucks).

Also, The author lists the requirements as "inform, educate and entertain" -- and I'd add -- "in that order". I've cut things from my talk because they were funny (IMO), but ultimately didn't support the content of the talk enough. After all -- This is a tech talk, not a standup routine.

All three are very hard to do well -- but I do agree with the author in that's it's the speakers job to do all three.

Andrei Alexandrescu comes to mind as someone who does this often. Plenty of talks on youtube.

I've only given talks to small audiences but they were very well-received. I often focus on humour, partially because I don't really have the background to deep-dive technical material hard enough for that to be interesting in-and-of-itself (maybe this is imposter syndrome).

It is very important though. It's very easy to lose an audience, and the truth is a lot of the speakers before you will likely range from slightly boring to extremely boring. The audience can be primed to totally clock out if you don't grab them immediately and keep them for the whole thing.

I read some advice from an experienced academic about this which stuck with me (unfortunately can't remember who!).

If you want to keep people's attention, make every slide as minimally simple as possible. Like one diagram and maybe a few words. Listing out bullet points of full sentences might feel efficient but it's no better than just saying what you would have written. And lots of text is a lot more glaze-inducing for most of the audience. You can point to supplementary docs for detail.

Another idea is to break up longer talks (30min+) in two with some slides of nice photos you've taken.

You want to watch a few talks by James Mickens.

One point that's important on the "entertain" front is that it doesn't need to mean humour/jokes. More likely it's things like well designed slides, interactive elements like demos or anecdotes to break up technical content.

Humour can work in presentations but it's really hard to pull off well. A lot of jokes rely on things like shared background/experience/cultural touchstones, so tricky to do in a conference where you might not know those things about your audience.

If you do use humour, I'd recommend not making it core to the talk, so if people don't get the jokes, it doesn't ruin the talk for them. Also generally use it sparingly, the odd meme can be funny, one on every slide probably not a great idea.

he does great talks, but important to note that not everyone can emulate him well :)

Another reason to avoid walls of text on slides, is that attendees will spend the time reading the slide, not listening to the talk.

If you want to have something for attendees to refer back to after the talk, a complementary blog/whitepaper is a better idea than putting all your details in the talk slides

A pet peeve of mine are slides with walls of text. I put a few bullets or graphic on a slide mainly as a signpost for myself. By the time I give a presentation I've practiced enough that I can see any slide and go from there.

The co-creator of D 2.0? That guy is a legend.