How To Give A Presentation
Many people hate giving presentations at work, and for good reason. I personally would rather eat a plate of broken glass soaked in cyanide than get up in front of people and talk for an hour. But that’s what I had to do, yesterday. And, in order to get through the process without fainting or puking or sinking to my knees and cursing the gods I’d apparently angered, I used several techniques I’ve learned over the years to make the whole ordeal less excruciating. I will now share these techniques with you.
Talk really, really fast. Think about the guy who reads the fine print at the end of commercials, the one who sounds like he’s been forcefed vast quantities of speed and then drilled until he’s able to squeeze thirty syllables into 300 microseconds — think about that dude, and then go twice as fast. This has many advantages. One, it significantly reduces the amount of time you’re up there. Second, it makes it difficult for people to criticize any part of your presentation, since they can’t understand a single word you’re saying. But you’ve said the words, and that’s what’s important.
Become a mass of annoying tics. Fidget with your slide clicky thing. Wipe constantly at your nose, as if to dam an incipient flood of snot. Gesture aimlessly with your hands. Nod at odd times. Pace backwards and forwards, as if you’re a novice line dancer. If you can manage a full epileptic seizure, by all means do it. This stuff may make your presentation go a little longer than it absolutely has to, but it will definitely make people avert their eyes, and tune you out, so that they’ll have less cause to mock your crappy presentation skills afterwards. They’ll mock you for being a crazy person, of course, but that’s the price you pay. In life, one has to make choices.
Talk constantly about what you’re about to talk about, and then don’t talk about it. This is a subtle but effective trick. As you go through the bullet points in your slides, say something useless and vague about each, and then say “But we’ll get to that later”. Do this at least ten times in the first two slides. And then — and this is the key — do it ten more times in the next two slides. You have no intention of talking about any of this stuff, of course. At some point your audience’s short-term memories will fill up with the muck of all of these broken promises, until eventually they’ll just dump the whole mess and fall asleep. Or they’ll stay awake. It doesn’t matter. This technique allows you to get through the whole hour without actually saying anything, but you’re saying nothing in a way that involves the speaking of many words.
Freeze like a deer in headlights whenever anyone asks you a question. Stand up very straight (you should be slouching throughout the whole presentation, incidentally, until this point) and then stare at your questioner like he’s a giant viking marauder with a huge battleaxe poised quivering over your head. Open your mouth. Make noises. Stutter. Eventually, say something inconsequential but vaguely related to the question — an old politician’s trick. This will get you past that question, and dissuade any future questions. Win-win.
Sabotage your presentation equipment. If thing are going very, very badly, then you can always go nuclear. Plant tiny explosives in your projector, for example, or loosen the moorings on the projection screen, or maybe even install some nasty, viral software on your laptop — Microsoft Windows, for example. Then, if you absolutely can’t stand it anymore, trip every one of these mechanisms. When the projector blows up, and the screen falls down at your feet, and the laptop crashes … well, what can you do? Here’s what you can do. You can rush through an abridged version of your presentation, make your apologies, and end early. Hey, you did the best you could. You’re a trooper.
If you learn all of these techniques, and practice them well, presentations will soon become effortless, and possibly even fun. Try it. You’ll thank me.
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