A presentation requires a lot of work. It isn’t trivial to prepare a presentation and deliver it to a group of peers! Without you spending time preparing, your talk will be boring. First, so as to share your sense of accomplishment, you need passion and to enjoy your work. Then you need some rules. Finally you need hard work. This piece is to give you what you need to successfully share your favourite topic.

Only too often, at school or at university, teachers, professors don’t know how to help students prepare and deliver their presentation or talk. I see students preparing 20 or more slides using Prezi or PowerPoint

Please prepare with Guy Kawasaki in mind.

Guy Kawasaki gives the 10-20-30 rule :
1. 10 slides ONLY
2. 20 minutes talk
3. Font size in 50% of the oldest participant. If your teacher is 40, then choose 20, but if your principal who is 60 years old may watch, then use a font size of 30.

Here is his updated renowned talk from 2012. Presentations still tend to have too many slides and too many unreadable slides.

Now give yourself time to watch some amazing presentations.

First one on body language:

Amy Cuddy shows 2 slides, 3 graphs, and repeats the first two. She then introduces 2 slides, and repeats her two again. This is followed by 3 concluding slides. Her presentation is dynamic and her ambition is to leave us with those two fundamental slides. Other than that, there is a short introductory video and some photographs to illustrate her words.

Second one: Taylor Wilson only uses photographs, no words on his slides.

And set yourself some rules.
June Cohen starts her TED talk on the subject with three words: preparation, preparation, preparation.

Here is the TED rule stone poster talked about by June Cohen.

and a simplified rule poster on The Spicy Learning Blog:

So now you know. Be passionate. Enjoy. Have something to say. Be clear. Don’t ramble on. Illustrate only what you can’t share or say.