Preparing the talk (Part 2)

Earth to Rochie!

There's no way for me to prepare a Gore-like presentation in a week! Reading more about the preparation that went into his An Inconvenient Truth lecture made me realise that his Oscar-winning and Nobel Peace Prize-winning presentation was the product of quite a lot of initial lectures, revisions... but the content is essentially the same. Still, I keep that lecture (note: both the visual aid and the presentation itself) as an example of how to do an oral presentation.

Still working on how to make my presentation professional-looking and clutter-free, I came across Steve Jobs' Macworld 2007 keynote speech. Aside from the glaring absence of the otherwise omnipresent bullet point, what struck me with this presentation was that he could deliver his message WITHOUT the aid of his slides! How did he do this? He used pictures, videos, graphs, and charts to illustrate his point most of the time, and rarely did he write the point down (unless it's the number of downloads or number of songs available in iTunes). At one point, he even had a blank slide so everyone's attention would go back to him! Now that's a very gutsy move - a mark of confidence. He has succeeded with getting rid of the crutch that is the slide presentation, and instead, uses it as it really is - an AID. Being able to tell the story with minimal visual aids is one philosophy I'd like to practice myself (and is yet another goal to reach).

If Mr Jobs uses the slides as visual aids, Prof Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law has gone to the extreme of putting only a key word or phrase, and almost no pictures in his presentation... plus, the font he used was the typewriter-like one: white letters on a black background, a distinctive style straight out of the silent movie era. I have only listened to part of his talk (and watched the Powerpoint presentation) and still I became amazed at how he synchronised his narration with the slides! Some people call this "slide as chorus," a term I picked up in Wikipedia, I think.

In a weird way, the design of these people's slides remind me of Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement: simple and elegant; meaningful despite the empty spaces. This brings me to the blog site on presentation design I came across the other day while finding commentaries on effective public speakers, and on the bad ones too: Presentation Zen (http://www.presentationzen.com/) by Garr Reynolds. A very interesting read, and a mine full of lessons on presentation. My favourite article: the entry bringing Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' presentations head to head. A great study on contrasting styles.

Anyway, back to Prof Lessig and Mr Jobs...

Of course, their ways of presenting will not always be applicable in the sciences, and it would be difficult to do a Steve Jobs-styled presentation on something technical with graphs and charts as the heart and soul of a presentation. But if there is a means to shake things up a bit and make the talk a bit more entertaining, then I'd try it. I mean, there are scientists speaking during the annual TEDTalks; these speakers are some of the best minds in the world, and they are so unlike the typical professor! Two who I am familiar with are Jane Goodall and Al Gore (yet again). I have yet to see the Ms Goodall's TEDtalk on her research, but I'm sure they are as superb as her features in the National Geographic.