Created by @carlogilmar.
I create this guidelines based on my experience as a speaker, developer, trainer, and a graphic recorder. As Graphic Recorder I use to build bridges between the speaker, the content, and the audience into a graphic recording, which it's an illustration to represent the content in a visual traduction. After draw many and many talks in real time I can share the following practices for improve your public speaking. Enjoy, Carlo 😁
| Content |
|---|
| Content Structure 💡 |
| 1. Your talk as an experience ⭐️ |
| 2. Your Audience 🤼♂️ |
| 3. The Technical Content considerations 🏗️ |
| 4. Emphatize through your experience 💖 |
| 5. Call to Action 🔥 |
| Speaking 🗣️ |
| 6. The Story Script 💻 |
| 7. Record your talk 📹 |
| 8. The Online Script 🎬 |
Sometimes we need to be clear with the goals of our presentation. Start with answer the follow questions allows you to be focused on the main goal of your talk. Remember that have 20-50 minutes is really few time to explain many things.
| Questions | Reason |
|---|---|
| 1. What it's the main topic? | Choose just 1 idea that you want to explain. Keep it simple. |
| 2. Who are your audience? (novices, experts, general public, developers, managers, etc...) | Define the people who are you going to talk. |
| 3. What it's the main message that you want to communicate to your audience? | Think on what do you want to encourage the people who are listen to you. |
Example
| Your Talk Title | The BEAM Processes |
|---|---|
| What it's the main topic? | Show how a BEAM process works. |
| Who are your audience? | Developers with experience in Erlang/Elixir with few knowledge about OTP. |
| What it's the main message that you want to communicate to your audience? | Learn processes it's a great way to start to understand how BEAM works. |
Define the kind of audience that you're looking for motivate about your speech will allow you to prepare better material and put emphasis on the important remarks on your talk. The audience it's part of the main goals of your talk, keep in mind this.
| Audiences | Definition |
|---|---|
| Main audience | The people that you're looking to convince about your talk main topic. |
| Intermediate Audience | People with few context of your topic. |
| Beginner Audience | People without context of your topic. |
Why it's important to define this? Because if you want to be sure more people it's undertanding you, you need to take care of them. Any audience has many different kinds of levels involved. You can planning better your content and make sure everybody is following you during your talk.
Example
| Audiences | Definition |
|---|---|
| Main audience | Developers with experience in Erlang/Elixir with few knowledge about OTP. |
| Intermediate Audience | Developers starting his journey in Erlang/Elixir. |
| Beginner Audience | Developers without any context about the BEAM world. |
Structure content is complex, but if you have in mind the previous points about your goals and your audiences, you'll be able to structure a better sequence of ideas to present.
- Keep in mind the duration. The technical talks have few time to explain many things.
- Keep it simple, less is more.
- You're building a learning space between you and your audience. You're not alone, you're a guide for them.
- Technical content is hard to follow.
- Emphatize with your audience. Don't assume everyone is understanding you.
- Experiment, iterate, make retrospectives and improve.
If you want to improve the story behind your talk I strongly recommend you to check the dialectics method.
After structure your content, you can answer this questions and improve it:
- What are the 5 concepts to understand your main topic?
- Can you measure how much your audience is understanding you?
- How can you achieve everyone is really understanding your main topic?
- How many summaries did you include in your presentation?
- Technical content is complex.
- Learning is a complex, and it's not a lineal process.
- You're building a brigde between your content and your audience.
- Share a personal achievement where you can mix your content and your experience could be the perfect bridge.
Before to finish your presentation, consider share a complement to extend your content:
- Courses, videos and books recommendations.
- Create a public repository on GitHub to share your references.
- Create a small guide with the next steps to learn this. (It could be a tutorial or a blog post)
- Prepare a set of most common questions with the anwswers.
This moment is a great point to interact with the audience.
After design all your content you'll be able to add notes in every slide. Altough this could be a hard work, this a great way to improve all your communication skills.
- In a document, you can use google docs or word, add all the slides.
- Slide by slide, add all you speech: every word that you are going to say should be here. This is your story script.
- Don't forget add anything that you're going to say here. (It's like TDD!)
- Read your script and recognize your speech. Maybe after this step you will want to modify your content. Be your own audience.
After wrote your story script, you'll be to implement many strategies just for you to improve your comunication skills.
- Record a video of you reading your script in front of your camera. It doesn't matter if you are just reading your script.
- Watch yourself and recognize your speech. Become your own audience.
- Recognize yourself: your voice, your gestures and your movements. (You can practice in front of a mirror.)
- Modify your content/slides where you feel that you need more emphasis on your speech.
- Can you achieve all the things that you planned for this talk as an attendee? If your answer is not, this is the moment to add and improve your content.
Remember this exercise is just for you.
When you're speaking in an online presentation you could have to deal with the streaming production, for this cases you can complement your story script:
- Include music sections, videos, screen sharing, live coding.
- Add the duration per section.
- If you are the producer, you can include which device you should use.
- Be as much as detailed possible. Don’t be improvised.
- Make your script your safe place.
- If you're including live coding, consider record your explanations to be on time.
Example
| Steps |
|---|
| 1. Define your talk title |
| 2. Develop your content structure |
| 3. Prepare a call to action |
| 4. Write your script |
| 5. Record your talk |
| 6. Improve your experience |
Most of this exercises were supervised and co-designed by Pedro Kominik.
You can't reproduce totally or partially this content without an explicit permission by the creator. This content is under GPL-3.0 license.