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How to Give a Good Talk

(blog.sigplan.org)
271 points pykello | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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ehutch79 ◴[] No.45116982[source]
Ugh, I watch a lot of conference videos, I have more donts than dos. Things that make me turn off a video.

- Yes, tell me who you are, and why i should listen to you. But keep it to 1 slide, and 1 minute. I shouldn't be able to walk away and come back literal 5 minutes later and have you still yammering about yourself. especially for a 15 minute lightening talk.

- Your talk title should be the agenda. I do NOT need a slide by slide table of contents for your talk, or you reading out the table of contents.

- Accents, even heavy ones, aren't much of a problem. Looking anxious isn't a problem, i feel you there. However, You mumbling is. Being overly monotone is. Looking bored yourself doesn't help. People are there because they _know_ you have something their interested to say, you can be confident that people will listen.

- Get to the point. Seriously. I shouldn't be able to scrub ahead 10+ minutes and not have you talking about the topic at hand. Please don't explain the basics, like what a web browser is, when your audience is a web dev conference.

-Cut the fluff. Especially if you're adhd or other neuro diverse, you need to work to stay on topic. It _might_ help if you write a script, and have someone go through and mark anything off topic. Even if you don't use the script on stage, writing it and having it might anchor you to the topic at hand.

You don't need to be perfect on stage. We'll all forgive a lot that happens in a talk. We've all experienced the wrath of the demo gods. We get it, you're cool. BUT only if you're actually giving your talk. Note that most of my complaints circle around not actually giving your talk while you're on stage.

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1. baxuz ◴[] No.45117756[source]
> Accents, even heavy ones, aren't much of a problem.

I strongly disagree. I stopped watching Chrome DevTools update videos a few years back because I have difficulty understanding the presenter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOodTLAjPsE

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2. triceratops ◴[] No.45118147[source]
Sounds fine to me. Not even in the top 10 heaviest accents I've heard in my career.
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3. bakje ◴[] No.45118825[source]
If English isn’t your first language it can be very hard to understand someone if they have an accent you’re not used to.
4. baxuz ◴[] No.45124220[source]
It's not in my top 10 either, but I don't have examples of those.

I can understand her if I'm try hard, but I think that listening to a speaker shouldn't require active effort in order to understand them.

5. socalgal2 ◴[] No.45124225[source]
Is this a problem solved by current or near current tech? Like (1) you can read the transcript or captions (2) you can get it respoken by some tech?

I guess I'm used to those accents though.

I wouldn't have brought this up but I recently ran into an auto translated youtube video. I have my youtube set to Japanese. I watched a presentation I know was in English but Youtube presented it with Japanese voices. I didn't actually want that and couldn't find how to turn it off but I was still impressed. So maybe that can add dialets so you can choose California English and someone else can choose Singlish and someone else can choose Scotish English, etc...

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6. agos ◴[] No.45125341[source]
that's a really tough accent. luckily the video has excellent subtitles, which reminds us that accessibility is important for everyone, not only for the impaired
7. jen20 ◴[] No.45127786[source]
I don’t know which accent this is referring to, but if I was going to read the transcript I’d rather it was just a post which had also been edited.