Chapter 30. Out Loud
If youâre looking for advice on giving a presentation, the Internet is chock-full of endless advice. If youâre looking for tips on writing the presentation, the Internet goes dark for a fairly simply reason. To think about how to write a presentation, you need to think about how you speak, and thatâs not what youâre doing when you read or write. Iâll demonstrate. Say the following out loud right now:
I am reading this out loud to no one in particular.
Were you surprised to hear your voice? I was. Did you actually read it out loud? No? Why not? Sitting in a coffee shop? Worried that the guy next to you will think youâre a freak? This basic discomfort is the reason itâs tricky to explain how to present in a piece of writing. The skills involved in writing a clever paragraph are completely different from those used for developing and delivering that clever paragraph to a room full of strangers.
You still havenât read it out loud, have you?
Presentation or Speech?
Developing a compelling presentation involves a series of decisions and exercises to align your head with the fact that youâre delivering your content directly to people. No Internet. No weblog. Just you.
Your first decision: speech or presentation? Wondering about the difference? Take a quick look at two entirely different appearances by Steve Jobs. The first is his "Three Storiesâ speech at Stanford,[3] and the second is part of his MacWorld 2007 keynote.[4]
You need to watch only a few ...
Get Being Geek now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.