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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).
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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