* Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk.
* A frame with too little on it is better than a frame with too much on it. A usual frame should have between 20 and 40 words. The maximum should be at about 80 words
* Do not assume that everyone in the audience is an expert on the subject matter. Even if the people listening to you should be experts, they may last have heard about things you consider obvious several years ago. You should always have the time for a quick reminder of what exactly a “semantical complexity class” or an “ω-complete partial ordering” is.
* Keep it simple. Typically, your audience will see a slide for less than 50 seconds. They will not have the time to puzzle through long sentences or complicated formulas
* Do not use more than two levels of “subitemizing.” beamer supports three levels, but you should not use that third level. Mostly, you should not even use the second one. Use good graphics instead.
* Never use footnotes. They needlessly disrupt the flow of reading. Either what is said in the footnote is important and should be put in the normal text; or it is not important and should be omitted (especially in a presentation).
* Use short sentences.
* Put (at least) one graphic on each slide, whenever possible. Visualizations help an audience enormously
* Like text, you should explain everything that is shown on a graphic. Unexplained details make the audience puzzle whether this was something important that they have missed. Be careful when importing graphics from a paper or some other source. They usually have much more detail than you will be able to explain and should be radically simplified
* Do not use animations just to attract the attention of your audience. This often distracts attention away from the main topic of the slide. No matter how cute a rotating, flying theorem seems to look and no matter how badly you feel your audience needs some action to keep it happy, most people in the audience will typically feel you are making fun of them
This is good advice for boring talks, and the kinds of people who make them.
Imagine the same advice being given to standup comedians: “Bits should be a medium size, not too long.” “Avoid long words and try not to alienate your audience”. What a snooze fest!
A good talk is a performance piece. It should be simultaneously entertaining and informative. You do that by using narrative, by connecting with the audience, and by being compelling (via emotion and showing your own pleasure to the audience). If the audience is so busy reading your slides that they don’t pay attention to you, you’ve failed as a speaker.
I’m going to take a big risk here. I challenge you to go watch any great talk online, in just about any field. Watch Steve jobs introduce the iPhone. Watch a standup comedian. Watch a tech demo. Or your favourite conference speech. Or any popular YouTuber. They will almost never be this kind of talk, with subheadings and the appropriate amount of “supportive graphics”.
These “rules” are well meaning, but mediocre. They might even be helpful for a lot of people. But you should aspire higher. Aim to give a great talk. Not just a talk that’s slightly less horrible than your peers.
I couldn't agree more. These "rules" are to help people avoid really really bad presentations. They shouldn't be viewed as an official way of making good presentations.
The "say what you're going to say, say it and then say what you said" rule is probably the worst offender here. It's meant to stop people missing out important context but very often it just leads to boring repetition.
Funny you should mention stand-up comedians because the best presentation advice I ever got came from a workshop my company arranged that was given by a standup comedian. His main message was to follow the "hero's tale" format, which you'd think doesn't apply to tech presentations, but you'd be surprised how often it actually does.
> * Ideally, a table of contents should be understandable by itself. In particular, it should be comprehensible before someone has heard your talk.
The typical agenda slide often is more than useless in my opinion.
There are cases where it is good - if you have a recording and discuss individual topics and thus can jump around (but then have time marks as well and jump options in the player), but 99% of agendas are useless and speakers waste a lot of time on them (1. Introduce the speaker 2. Introduce the problem 3. Show old solutions 4. Show the new solution 5. Summary)
A ToC slide should typically be avoided -- especially if you only show it once.
Advice I heard but don't know the source of: audiences tend to have a "stack" of about 7 items, possibly less. Only put stuff on the stack you are going to use.
A linear story fits well with this advice. A ToC breaks linearity and tries to push all of its items onto the stack, without any payoff. Within 2 slides, the audience has forgotten your ToC slide, since there's no point to keeping it on the stack. Best case, there's some minor payoff -- but almost never worth the cost of saturating the stack. Most often, it is an unnecessary crutch. So unless it is mandatory (could be for students), just make your presentation's narrative flow logically instead.
Some excerpts: