Don Box - What goes into a great technical presentation?

I'm a pretty good public speaker if I do say so myself. In 1999 (5th grade of secondary school (VWO)) I got to the national finals for the Netherlands-England Foundation Public Speaking Competition. That was just a five minutes talk though, followed by a three minute questions session. Slides weren't allowed.

Being a college student I have many, many anecdotes about how horrible people can be when giving talks or lectures. In the first year the man who gave Computer Architecture tended to go through about 150 overhead sheets in a single hour. You honestly had no idea what he was on about anymore after a while. Come to think about it, I have had only one really good teacher in that respect. Professor Rosenberg, the man who single-handedly invented DNA Computing (every book on the subject seems to be written by him) was my teacher for both Theory of Concurrency and DNA Computing. He is a clone of Einstein by the way he looks, but he gives great lectures. He uses these elaborate overhead sheets, that show you parts of something, and then he overlaps them and it's the whole thing. I'll also never forget his explanation of petri nets, doing what he called the 'token game' using push-pins.

What's probably the worst are seminars. A seminar at Uni means that the students themselves have to give presentations about the subject matter. Typically this means people are giving a presentation about something they hadn't even heard of until the night before. Especially in those situations you end up with people trying to cram as much information as possible onto the PowerPoint sheets (so they don't actually have to learn it) and read it out loud. One thing that makes it worse is the fact that we have many foreign students, whose English pronounciation is often very bad. We have one Chinese student that can read and understand English just find, but if he tries to speak it I have no idea what he's saying. It's not his fault really, but it does make his presentations quite uninteresting.

I always try to avoid things like that (reading out loud, too many slides, etc.), and the fact that I usually get pretty high grades for my presentations (even the occasional 10 out of 10) seems to suggest I'm pretty successful.