Presentation Skills (Part I): What Are You Presenting?

I've seen literally hundreds of presentations in my life, even if you confine it to that ubiquitous slideshow kind normally masquerading under the misnomer 'PowerPoint' (having neither power nor point, that is). What I've noticed is that quite often, the presenter doesn't know his presentation equipment, his slides, his intention, or his strengths and weaknesses in presentation. Sometimes, more than one of these areas of unknowledge shows; sometimes, the person is completely clueless.

That's not to say I haven't been there myself. The thing is that you have to actually think about the purpose, the intent, the structure and content of the presentation. You must know what it's for, how you intend it to come out, how the parts are connected, and what the parts are in the first place. And after all that, you must know if you can do it yourself, or if some other form is more suited to you as a presenter.

I've seen egregious examples of bad presentations before. One was by Mustache, who while intelligent and a generally nice, wise, tactful person, was really badly served by whoever did his PowerPoint slides for him. It wasn't helped that he tends to drift towards monotonous unless really excited, which isn't often. One was by Yak, who is likewise intelligent but tends to meddle with his trousers and drift off into odd tangents before losing the thread completely and forgetting what's coming up next.

The point is that presentations derive their power from effectiveness. You need to know what you're trying to do and make sure the odds are stacked in your favour so that it's likely you will accomplish it. In the next few posts, I'll elaborate on this — hopefully in time for it to be of use to a whole bunch of people I know who are about to make major presentations.