The audience is your enemy!
It’s just three more days until we fly to Kiev to attend Rubyshift where we’ll be giving a short presentation about our summer of code. To help us prepare we visited Juliane Peterson for some advice on how to give a good presentation.
Julieane has been helping out all the Berlin-based RGSoC students with their presentations. She’s an expert in the science of public speaking (as well as being a linguist and teacher). Amongst the many, many excellent pointers she had the ones we really liked were about posture and how to stand:
- your feet should be shoulder distance apart
- bend the knees a little bit
- relax your shoulders
- lean the whole body forward
Lean forward? Yes. Because the audience is your enemy! If you lean forward it sends a psychological signal to the audience that you aren’t scared, and won’t be running away. It projects confidence and presence, which will capture their attention.
Other tips for keeping the audience captivated are:
- talk in short sentences
- repetition, repetition, repetition
- pause a little bit between points (especially hard for Anja)
- funny pictures are always good
It was great to talk to her. We went into the session shy and nervous, and came out happy and confident. Many many (many) thanks!
