[kwlug-disc] Tips on How to give a good presentation

[Richard Weait]

Just a few points on How to give a good presentation from my
perspective.  I'm lucky enough to have seen presentations at dozens of
different LUGs and conferences in the last five years.  Almost every
presentation I've seen has been on the "worth attending" side of the
Bell curve.  I am uniformly impressed by the breadth of knowledge and
interests of the presenters I've seen at LUGs and FLOSS conferences.
I'm also deeply grateful to them for taking the time to distill their
knowledge into a presentation and then volunteer to share it with the
audience.

We've been fortunate at KWLUG to have some top notch presenters and
presentations.  My favorites include:

Glen from Hamilton LUG - Top Ten Linux commandline tools.
Glenn Cooke - SEO
John Van Ostrand - several
Khalid Baheyeldin - several
Rob Day - Your first kernel module

These presentations are a step above all the others because of the
absolute content area expertise of the presenters and the ease with
which they deliver their knowledge to us.

It seems to me that there are two ways to give expert presentations as
a top-notch presenter.  I'll call these the Hard Way and the Easy Way.

The Hard Way is:
1) be a content expert
2) be an excellent presenter
3) give the presentation

This is the hard way because not everybody considers themselves to be
a topic expert and an excellent presenter.  And who wants to put in
all that time?  ;-)

The Easy Way is:
1) pick a topic about which you are enthusiastic and informed
2) create a related story to tell
3) create slides that relate to the story
4) rehearse the story
5) give the presentation

This is the easy way because it allows the rest of us to appear to be
somewhat expert and somewhat capable as a presenter.

Please add your presentation tips to this thread.