charity talks

I did a woodland charity talk this evening.  It was my first outing with the new set of slides (although they've been digital for years now I still think of them as slides.  Images doesn't sound quite right, and pictures certainly doesn't).  They arrived as a download in Powerpoint, and I was quite proud of myself that I managed to remember how to edit them in Powerpoint (insert speaker's name here, plus I spotted a rogue comma in one of the titles, and decided to ignore the volunteer manager's instruction that I should not change the order), and then copy them all over to a memory stick in JPEG format, without having to ask the Systems Administrator for help half way through.

The slides came with a set of notes which should form the basis of the presentation, and actually flowed pretty coherently.  It can be tricky talking off someone else's script if you don't find the ideas flow in a natural sequence.  I suppose everybody has their own views on what constitutes a natural sequence, but I think there are some ground rules irrespective of personal style.  A good talk covers each topic in turn, as fully as it is going to given the time available and the nature of the audience, and then moves on to the next one.  It doesn't suddenly flip back to the same topic three slides on, and it should be possible to work out what you're supposed to be talking about from the nature of the slide even when there isn't much text.

I have an absolute rule never to talk from notes.  Radio programmes where the presenter sounds as though they are reading out an essay rather than talking to their listeners directly are almost always dire, and in a live talk it's good to make eye contact with the audience.  It works as long as you know the subject, but it's a lot easier when the slides act as natural prompts, not so good when by the seventeenth picture of a tree you are struggling to remember what on earth you are supposed to say at this point.  The new presentation has only half as many slides as the old one, and I think that makes it easier, one slide per topic.  As soon as you have two or three you're in danger of finding you've run out of material by the time you get to the third, or still haven't covered everything you meant to by the end of the second slide only to find that there isn't a third.

They were a nice group, and made a more than generous donation to the charity.  I only told them at the end that they'd been my guinea pigs as I hadn't done this version of the talk before.  I am due to do the talk again the day after tomorrow, after my diary muddle, so by the end of two performances in three days I should be completely fluent.