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Notes -
Why are most people so godawful at presenting and demonstrating things when even the tiniest bit of knowledge and effort would make them 10x better?
This was inspired by a recent demonstration video I saw that took ages to get to the point while clearly not being about engagement or view time farming, but I see the same issue over and over again whenever people present things on stage or in videos. Even many professionals seem to be really bad at it.
A long time ago in a university far away we had a mandatory "Introduction to speech communication"-course that concentrated on the basics, including how to give actually good presentations. In retrospect, that course was by far the most bang for buck of any university course I ever took. After I took it, people started somehow thinking I'm a natural presenter by just remembering a few key points and applying them to my presentations without having any particular natural talent at it (and my presentations weren't much good either before the course).
It really isn't rocket science. Most of it could be summarized by "Get to the point. Less is more. Hook the listener by starting with the key idea briefly and only then cover any background and details. Repeat the key points at the end. Keep slides to max 3-4 points per slide and reserve anything else to auxiliary materials. Always show the entire slide at once so the viewer pays attention to what you say instead of wondering when the next point will be revealed. Show brief examples if applicable."
Really basic things, super easy to learn, super easy to apply with the tiniest bit of practise (if I can do it with my "Ackshually that's a very interesting detail, let's totally get sidetracked by it"-ADHD diagnosed brain, there's no reason most other people can't). Enough to easily get me into the top 10-20% of presenters and that includes people whose entire job it is to present and market things (like a marketing director at an old job saying "Skooma, why don't you present this since you're so good at it?" - in a group where half the people were from the marketing dept). Following those rules also makes presenting much easier as you have to do so much less (by leaving out pointless details and fluff and realizing nobody is going to remember most of it anyway so it doesn't matter if you leave out some tiny detail).
Practice makes perfect, but most people only give presentations and demonstrations at most a couple of times per year, so they never get better. Also, only a tiny minority ever record themselves and go back over the recordings to see how they might improve (particularly by excising “uh,” “um,” “er,” etc.).
Relatedly, most people don’t prepare properly. I’ve heard it said that you should ideally spend an hour of preparation for every minute you’ll spend speaking. That may be taking things to an extreme, but a ratio of one hour preparing to 15 minutes speaking has always struck me as the absolute bare minimum. I think most bad presenters just wing it.
“I’ll just wing it” might be more common among extroverts. They enjoy talking to people and assume that those skills will transfer seamlessly to giving presentations (they don’t). On the other hand, some introverts have a deathly fear of public speaking, so they suck because they’re nervous.
Nervous people especially, but also others, talk too fast. Sometimes this is unavoidable if you have to cram a lot of information into a sort time frame (for example), but it’s pretty common even when there are no real time constraints. Talking too fast isn’t great on its own, but it also usually leads to more “ums,” since the brain can’t keep up with the tongue.
Very few people take a systematic approach to learning new skills, especially outside a classroom setting. So even if they think “I’d like to be a better presenter” (which more likely than not never even occurs to them), they’ll never take the next step of thinking “how?” And most people who did take a communications class in college regarded it as a silly freshman blow-off class; it didn’t occur to them that they might actually learn something valuable from it. (To be fair, though, many colleges treat that class the same way, assigning it to any random adjunct who happens to be teaching a lighter-than-normal load.)
Most people are fuzzy thinkers. They include unnecessary details and get lost down rabbit holes when they present because that’s just how they always think. Even with ample preparation time, it probably wouldn’t occur to them to change that aspect of their presentation.
"Just wing it" is such insidious advice, because that's what it looks like all the best speakers are doing, even though they're not (for the most part). The trick nobody tells you is that the best way to come across as comfortably speaking extemporaneously is actually to put a ton of work into preparation. The more you prep, the less "prepared" you will come off as. Authenticity, ironically enough, does not come naturally to most speakers, and requires a higher level of familiarity with your material than most people are willing to put the effort into getting.
But also once you've given broadly the same talk a few times you don't really need to prep it again. Vaguely modify the structure depending on audience interests and time allotted, make sure you're pitching at the right level, slot in a couple of new things if they come up and you're cooking with ingredients you know.
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Stress hurts. I mechanically know the rules, but in high-stakes or in front of especially skeptical it's easy to ramble or try to add too many humanizing details that weren't in the original plan. And different people react to stress differently: my boss tends to crack jokes, and I've seen people who tend to freeze up even for topics they could normally recite in their sleep.
We train them wrong. From 2000-2005, it was common for introductory communications technology courses to emphasize animations, and forget to talk about why you should never fucking use them. I've seen college courses that encouraged people to make sure their slides had enough detail that they wouldn't need notes. A lot of well-meaning high school courses form teaching presentation skills as small series of one-and-done tests with feedback, rather than improving the same presentation over time, which just reinforces whatever bad habits someone came in with.
Sometimes we're training for something else. There's something going on with a lot of US federal government and especially DoD spaces where overcrowded text is mandatory, rather than a failure mode. My guess from unrelated engineering world stuff is that the slidedeck is supposed to act as a distributable record for review later, and the conversation an invitation for discussion, but when that transfers over to one-to-very-many presentations the whole thing falls apart.
There's a difficult tension between good presentation and good storytelling, and most people naturally gravitate more toward the latter. Great presenters can interleave a story, but it's hard to tease a key idea when you want to leave your big conclusion for the climax.
A lot of people just seem to struggle fully modeling the extent other people might not share information they have, even if the know it at an intellectual level. This tends to be the sort of thing that (at least outside of government slide decks) seems to be what results in giant fifty-point slides or explanations that keep getting interrupted by 'first I gotta explain X'.
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