Category: My Talks

If you set a hook at the beginning, answer the question before the end, but not too early. Keep them thinking.

Lots of folks take photos with their smartphone. Do you make it easy for them to take a lesson back home?

Plan your talk to be 5 minutes too short. You will not regret ending early. Ending late when everyone is getting up to walk out while you rush to finish completely ruins what might otherwise have been a great talk. Don’t be that guy.

Make a 1-page handout summarizing your best points. Make it so that it can stand alone, even if they did not hear you speak. Even better, store your document online and make a QR code so they can take it home in their fancy little mobile device.

When you wrap up, create a clear call to action. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Audiences will typically have lots on their mind. They might remember ONE THING. What one thing should they remember?

You decide.

The best talks have moments of mirth.

Thank your audience at the end. I can’t tell you how many talks get to the end and the presenter ruins a great closing by, “… and so that its it. Any questions?” And the audience cannot tell if they should clap or be quiet for the first hand-raise. Just take all the doubt away and ask for applause by saying, “THANK YOU.” Then after the applause, say “We are open for questions!” or “Please come up front, we’re happy to chat with you.”

A small point, but so much clearer. The opening and ending moments are what an audience will remember the most.

I like to have a summary slide with my biggest points, and then my contact info on the same page, that I can leave up during the question and answer period.

And, if the audience has been nice to me, I may take out my ukulele and strum some relevant EHR song parody.

CMIO’s take

Did you make it this far? Do you agree? Are you interested in the entire deck? See the link below to the PDF of the slides. Do you have a favorite book on how to make slides or give a talk? Have you seen Steve Jobs and his infamous Reality Distortion Field? Have you watched TED talks and seen how different they are from most dry academic lectures?

Let’s be both: great scientists and innovators, and also great communicators.

LINK to PDF of How to Give a Talk, Advanced: CT LIN

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2fstbq44vgk35vkn6th1h/2025-05.How.to.give.a.talk-advanced.CTLin.pdf?rlkey=78jgcibakerv0210rkdxl4z26&dl=0

Practice. I presume you will have read other books on presentations. When you think about being anxious, I love the idea of taking that tachcardia, those palpitations and heart-flopping sensations and re-interpreting them NOT as anxiety, but as excitement.

You are the expert. You have done more reading and more research that just about everyone on the planet. With extremely rare exception, everyone is here to support you and learn from you.

Speak to the person in the very back of the room. When you do that, you will find yourself projecting your voice more, and waving your arms more to make a bigger point. This works for your entire audience. Don’t look at the front row where you hope your friends are sitting.

Worst case, if you have frowny faces in the audience, look for anyone who is nodding or smiling, and use them as your islands in the sea and rotate your attention between them.

Avoid MONOTONE. Vary your speed, volume. Practice speaking clearly. Consider recording yourself and listening for verbal tic’s, or for swallowing the ends of your sentences (I do that, get quiet at the end of a sentence), or have someone listen and give you feedback. DON’T let anyone tell you your natural speaking voice is too fast or too slow. If you are excited about your topic, go for it, just make sure you don’t slur your sentences together.

Too many words. And, sitting behind a desk or standing behind a podium hides most of your body. Unless you are doing a technical demo, get out from behind and the them see your whole body and your non-verbal communication.

Dr. Corey Lyon is a dynamic speaker and does exactly that.

Try this! To engage your audience, hide a piece of paper. Have it be a printout of one of the slides with the answer to your question. Now you have at least one member of the audience who will respond to your question!

Pose the question (top right).

Your designated audience member finds the paper. Ask them to stand up, speak loudly and tell us the ANSWER! It is a surprise move that most audience have not seen, and it works well to wake people up and break the routine from your monologue.

CMIO’s take?

Do any of these presenter’s tricks resonate with you? Do you have other tricks? Let me know!

See part 1 of 4, prior post.

Don’t skimp on the size of your images, even if Powerpoint suggests framing them in cute little frames. No.

Full-bleed, a term from the days of the printing press, where you would size your photo/image to the edges of the press, so that the color ‘bleeds’ off the edges of the print, give an impression that there is no border between the image and real life. Make your images big as possible for more impact.

Tiny images are a waste of effort. And please don’t pack the page full of words. Please.

More like this. Full-bleed image. Then, talk about your points.

Yes, this is a full bleed image of some dummy. But please do prepare. Your preparation will show in how well you convey your ideas.

Too many words. How often have you heard people say “I know you can’t read this, but …” or “I’m sorry …” You control the slide. You decide what images to use, how to crop it, how to emphasize your point. Don’t passively paste something and the heave a big shrug “not my problem.”

YOU make it work or not work.

Here is an alternative. Keep your big ideas over a large icon or image, and then tell some stories to make your points. Talks are never about being comprehensive. They are about setting fire to someone’s imagination.

Please put some effort into making your ideas clear and easy to grasp.

Don’t make the audience work to figure out what you are trying to say.

Just because you have all these formatting tools does NOT mean you have to use them. The formatting should stay out of the way so that your ideas shine through. You want your audience to go “Wow, what a great idea” instead of “Can you read that? What do those words mean anyway?”

For example, when I see word widows (one word wrapping over onto the next line), I completely stop learning and get mad at the way the words show on the screen. What an aggravation and a waste for both of us.

Go read Richard Mayer’s work from 1988. Or Andy Goodman who writes about good communication for public interest companies http://thegoodmancenter.com. Specifically, this post:

https://www.thegoodmancenter.com/blog/icymi-say-the-words-show-the-pictures/

The point is: your learner has 2 channels: an audio channel, and a visual channel. If the information you are sending complements each other, more gets through. For example, show a picture with no words. Then, the Visual channel is uncluttered. Then, speak the words, telling about water vapor condensing into clouds. The Audio channel is uncluttered, and learning occurs.

HOWEVER! If you put words on the screen with the visual, the words and image clutter the visual channel. Even if speaker is silent, having both words and image on screen is WORSE for learning than a wordless image and a spoken lesson. There is a lot to absorb visually.

EVEN WORSE. If the screen contains an image, and also explanation words as above, AND THEN the speaker says the words or similar explanation, the learning is EVEN WORSE. The audio channel interferes with the visual channel and the learner automatically starts comparing comparing your spoken words with the written words, and now no one is paying attention to the idea, they’re all stuck on comparing words.

THIS IS TERRIBLE and WE ARE ALL GUILTY OF PUTTING WORDS ON SCREEN AND THEN VERBALLY EXPLAINING WITH SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT WORDS.

I call this Polluting the Channels. I do it, you do it.

I both love this and hate it. I have now encapsulated my entire idea on one slide. And it is exactly, according to Dr. Mayer’s theories, the worst way to do it.

CMIO’s take?

Giving a talk, it turns out, is really hard. Knowing what we know now, how will you change? How will I change? Good luck to all of us.

I hate this, don’t you?

OK, lets see if these make sense to you.

Thanks to Dall-E for showing an asian doctor afraid of the scary In Basket Hyperobject part of the EHR.

I often forget that I’m talking to an audience whose needs might be different from what I want to talk about.

Make sure to start with a hook that will keep your audience from leaving. In this case, talk about Story and about the ABT technique, but don’t explain yet.

Sound smart by quoting smart people.

Here’s one of many books I’ve read on storytelling. Randy Olsen is a tenured professor of marine biology who went on to become a Hollywood script writer, one of the working-class storytellers of our age. We can trust his experience.

Olsen tells us that too many scientific presentations and articles are written in AAA style. This is the DEATH of communication: a litany of achievements with no story. Instead go after the strong bones of a good story: ABT: and … but … therefore.

Here’s an example.

CMIO’s take?

Practice your ABT this week. Come back next week for more lessons on presenting. The terrible state of scientific and indeed EHR communication means that it won’t take much to elevate your talk above the average. Let’s go!