The Mobile Presenter

Inexperienced speakers are often afraid that they may be forgetting an important point of their talk or that they get stuck and can't remember how to continue. Which is one of the reasons why so many presentations have lots of text on their slides.

Cue cards would seem to provide a solution to this problem. They're handy when you get stuck and since you now have the text of your talk at hand (pun intended), you can use more visual slides and still make sure not to forget anything of importance.

It should be obvious that you have to rehearse your presentation before you give it. Although, given the fact that I'm often seeing speaker overrun their time slot, I have to wonder if it's really something many speakers do. I get the impression that not rehearsing (at all or earnestly) is the number two reason for going over time (number one would be trying to cram too much content into the presentation).

Assuming you do rehearse: Is there an upper limit to rehearsing? I.e. can you rehearse too much?

You've probably heard this phrase from a speaker before: "I'll get back to that later." I'm not talking about the situations where this is in reaction to a question from the audience but about the cases where it's uttered during the planned part of a presentation.

Having had to sit through a presentation where this phrase came up a lot recently, I was wondering about when this might be acceptable and when it's not.

It should have been a short and straightforward presentation about "lessons learned". I knew what I was going to say, so I even skipped the step of sketching out ideas first and went straight to designing some draft slides. Then I did a rehearsal - and noticed that the story didn't quite work. I tweaked the presentation somewhat and tried again. It still didn't work.

I took me a while to figure out the problem: I was stuck in the mindset of following the exact sequence of events that had led to the lessons learned. Which meant that I was trying to hold back the resolution for as long as possible. Yet, as the presentation was supposed to be about those lessons, they should have been central to the presentation, not come as an appendix.

I attended a low-key concert recently. The artist wasn't too well-known (at least around here) and the audience was rather small. The concert took place in a small venue, but it could easily have held twice the amount of people. And so they (or rather us, myself included) were standing around rather scattered and well away from the small stage.

The opening act did his best in warming up the audience (and mostly succeeded) but couldn't change the fact that it was too small an audience for the venue. The main act then did the right thing: When she came up on stage, she encouraged the audience to come forward to the stage and also to get closer together. I like to think that this simple measure helped us enjoy the concert even more.