Like many students in the field of technology, I was not good at expressing myself before. Especially when I made speeches in public occasions, I thought about several truckloads of words in my mind and became incoherent as soon as I spoke, I didn’t know how to better organize my language. To this end, I have watched a lot of speeches by celebrities, and benefited a lot from their speeches. Today, I sum up some important points and encourage you to share them.

1. The PPT design

Before we talk about presentations, let’s talk about communication. The essence of communication is to let the other party easily understand what he didn’t know before, and further, let the other party understand what he didn’t know before through what he already knew. Most of the time we only tell our own stories, regardless of the feelings of the listeners. Those who attended the lectures were either merely interested or formally subservient. If you compare a speech to a communication or a need, the goal is to make the other person understand the purpose or value of the topic, not to be self-absorbed.

For example, in slide design, it’s usually neat and beautiful. If you’re drawing, be symmetrical with lines and layouts, and if you’re writing, indent. Programmers don’t think much of it, but if you tell them that indentation in code style makes code more readable, they’ll immediately pick it up and appreciate it.

2. The theme

The most important thing in a speech is the topic, so first and foremost, you need to know your topic. This involves your communication with the producers and your knowledge of the conference. For example, what is the makeup of the audience? How much do attendees know about the field? What does the audience want to hear? The most important thing is through this speech, what value to the audience? After the theme is clear, the main line of the speech needs to be set. There is a relatively fixed mode for technical sharing:

  • Who: Introduce yourself, let the audience know Who you are, and make connections.
  • What&When: Today we are going to share the topic, through a short introduction to attract the audience’s attention, curiosity;
  • What is the background of the whole project? Make a specific introduction based on the understanding of the audience.
  • Of course, for the sake of comprehensiveness, you can list them all, but the key suggestions of the introduction should be limited to 3~4 items;
  • Future: Let people know your plans for the Future, what you think about technology trends, etc.
  • Recap: Give another review of today’s topic to help the audience remember the core content.

3. The words

For your first speech, or for a particularly important presentation, verbatim is a great help if you want to make your presentation better and avoid a nervous moment. Verbatim scripts are great for organizing your language. The human brain isn’t very good at processing large amounts of information logically, but words and diagrams are very effective at sorting out logical relationships.

When using verbatim manuscripts, you should avoid reading from a script and constantly recall in your mind what the next sentence will be. Instead, you should fully understand the logic of verbatim manuscripts. During the speech, the key words that have been warmed up in your mind during the training process will be released smoothly according to this logic. You will gradually find the feeling and become more engaged with it. Finally, you can improvise according to the actual situation and become more and more relaxed and free.

4. Demo

Another feature of technology sharing is the frequent use of demos. The Demo looks simple, but getting it right is not:

  • How to fully demonstrate technical features and product features in the limited minutes?
  • How to connect multiple links and scenes, and how to switch the context more naturally?
  • How to avoid Demo failure? What if it fails?

We suggest that when preparing the Demo, we must consider these questions and do a good job of filing.

5. Training

After the preparation of the above content, we need to be ready to completely transform the resources into their own way to express it, which requires us to pass many times of training. There are many different ways of training. Here are some common ways:

  • Find a quiet place and practice on your own. You can use your phone to record and time. Record yourself correcting phrases like “um,” “right,” and so on.
  • Ask a trusted friend to audition. Sometimes for the content that you are too familiar with, although you think it is very easy, it is likely that your friends do not know much about it, or you are too used to the whole project, so you skip the necessary background introduction, which is easy to cause estrangement with the audience. Therefore, you should make adjustments based on your understanding of the audience.
  • Team internal demo. It is also very helpful to have the opportunity to give a trial lecture in the scope, so that you can get used to speaking in front of a certain number of audiences in advance.
  • Meditation. This is one of my favorite ways. Before going to sleep, I silently turn over the slides in my head, imagine the real speech scene, how I will say it, whether the Demo process is perfect, whether the key content is in place, and do it in a solid way.

Deliberate training is not the same as repeated training. The biggest difference between the two is whether iterative improvements are made based on feedback.

The so-called excellence comes from deliberate training and long-term accumulation in a short period of time. We often only see the amazing explosive power in a short period of time, but ignore the efforts and efforts behind it.