Being Geek

Chapter 30. Out Loud

If you’re looking for advice on giving a presentation, the Internet is chock-full of endless advice. If you’re 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 that’s not what you’re doing when you read or write. I’ll 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 you’re a freak? This basic discomfort is the reason it’s 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 haven’t 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 you’re 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 Stories” speech at Stanford,^[3] and the second is part of his MacWorld 2007 keynote.^[4]

You need to watch only a few minutes of both to get ...