Writing and Presenting

Bad news: you don’t have any. You THINK you have the right to all of this stuff: A working screen for a projector (as opposed to one that’s hung up in the ceiling and won’t come down) A working projector A functioning bulb in the projector A stand for the projector within cord’s reach of…

The conference season is coming – let’s get you a speaker slot.  Before you submit an abstract, do your research.  Here’s some of my past posts about presentations and abstracts: How to Write a Conference Abstract – the real goals of a session abstract is to get the right people into your room and keep the…

When I first started submitting abstracts to conferences, I wrote bland, technical descriptions of what I’d be talking about.  Later on, I thought being a good speaker meant having lots of people in my sessions, so I wrote spammy abstracts: “SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!  COME SEE THE MOSTEST SPECTACULAREST DISPLAY OF SKILLZ EVER!  EVERY SINGLE DATABASE…

One of our FreeCon Chicago brainstorming exercises was to talk about what makes a good training session, conference session, or keynote speech.  I started it by asking a few questions. Sign of a bad session: all the cool kids would rather stay out in the hallway. Does a successful session require a packed room? I…

I just had a champagne moment.

Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) blogged about having these champagne moments in his life, times when he was almost-but-not-quite-ready to pop the champagne open because he still wanted to take things higher. My standards aren’t quite so high – I recognize certain achievements as being champagne-worthy, and this is one of ’em.

Buck Woody (Blog – @BuckWoody) and I did a presentation at the PASS Summit called, “You’re Not Attractive, But Your Presentations Can Be.”  The audience asked a lot of good questions, and I wanted to recap some of ’em as blog posts.  The first one – and one of the most frequent questions I get…

Several hours into Edward Tufte‘s day-long seminar on visual communications in Chicago, he revealed what he really hates about our communications tools. He briefly touched on the origin of the desktop with the Xerox Alto, a document-oriented computer.  He said that users didn’t see applications – they saw lists of documents, and they chose which…

When you want to illustrate your writing with pictures, it’s tempting to use Google Images Search.  With millions of pictures at your fingertips, why not just right-click on someone’s awesome picture, save it, and use it in your blog? Even though it’s easy and it’s nearly impossible to catch, it’s still plagiarism, and you know…

Knock the audience out by knowing how to end the presentation, how to use your blog as resource material, why you should avoid sentences on slides, how to get the attendees involved, and how to fire yourself up with inspiration.