Principles of presentation

A presentation is a performance.
1. It is not your slides.
2. It should be prepared and rehearsed.
If you use visual aids, your audience will look at them.
1. Your visual aids should support your performance and not detract from it.
2. If your visual aids make it possible to obtain the information from your performance without you, then perhaps you are not making use of the possibilities that a presentation format offers.
Less is more.
1. Use your presentation to spark interest
2. A shorter presentation is better than a longer one.
3. Text on visual aids should have a specific purpose.
Teaching and presenting is not the same thing.

Below are a number of questions that can help with aligning a presentation with these principles.

Audience

A presentation is a performance. This means it is vital to understand who you are performing for.

What does the audience know? What do you want the audience to know?

Preparation

Like any performance, a presentation should be prepared.

Story boarding

Are you aware of the scenes in your presentation?

For example, I strongly recommend story boarding (like a play or a film) your presentations.

For example this image file is an actual story board for a presentation I gave recently.

Note that each box there does not necessarily correspond to a slide of a visual aid. It corresponds to a scene of your presentation.

Technology

Will your technology work?

When doing an in person presentation, I recommend trying to use the tools you will use before the actual presentation to make sure they work.

The same holds for virtual presentations.

Visual aids

Visual aids are one component (which is sometimes not necessary) of your presentation.

Like a play: the decorations/costumes/etc are all vital but they are not the entire performance.

During your performance will your visual aids distract from you?

What do you add to your visual aids?

If your performance adds nothing to the visual aids, perhaps you should write a manuscript instead of using visual aids.

Technology

Your choice of technology for your visual aids is important:

Will it work? Will the audience be able to see the visual aids?

I recommend using LaTeX's beamer package for presentations:

It creates a portable file format: pdf.
It can readily be used with other technical content that you might have written (mathematics or code).
The source code can be used with version control software.

Delivery

Rehearsing

Delivery of your performance should be rehearsed (like a play).

How long is your presentation?

You should know how long it is and possibly adjust your story board and your visual aids if necessary.

Does your performance achieve what you want it to achieve?

This is an opportunity to think about what you say/do, how you say or do it and whether or not it can be improved or removed.

Live demonstrations

For presentations that involve code.

Would a live demonstration be a valuable part of the performance?

Live code demonstrations can be effective, I recommend that they are thoroughly rehearsed and that a backup plan of some sort is in place in case something goes wrong.

Examples

Here are some recordings of presentations (note that they do not all follow the above principles):

Me giving a lightning talk presenting a library for the computation of Nash equilibria at PyDiff in 2016 (4:38 minutes)
Henry Wilde presenting a brief overview of the dask library at PyDiff 2017 (7:56 minutes)
Me giving a brief overview of the version control system git(8:20 minutes)
Geraint Palmer presenting how Python can be used to solve a variety of applied mathematical problems at PyCon UK 2017 (25:34 minutes)
Geraint Palmer presenting a Python library for studying queueing networks at PyCon UK 2016 (28:29 minutes)
Me presenting a Python library for the study of emergent behaviour at PyCon UK 2015 (32:35 minutes)
Nikoleta Glynatsi giving the keynote at PyCon UK 2018 (48:48 minutes)
Me speaking virtually about modelling epidemics at PyCon Africa 2020 (52:55 minutes)