The Vampire Presentation

The Vampire Presentation begins when The Speaker fumbles with the computer cable, like he’s trying to knit spaghetti. From my seat in the audience I imagine Transylvanian organ chords stab with each fumble of the powerpoint presentation. I see bats fly out above our heads when a window pops up on-screen flashing a blood red advert promising cream-induced eternal life to the 10,000th lucky visitor.

The Speaker begins in dull drone. Every few words they emit an “urm” or “yeah”, like the rasping laugh of a Nosferatu sizing us up for a bite.

I feel the blood drain from my concentration. I check my watch for the second time during this first slide but it does nothing to stem the flow of consciousness which is sucked from me with each of his unrehearsed words. It feels like The Speaker has been talking over their title slide for an eternity. Finally, fumbling with the laser pointer, they switch to the next slide. It is packed with text and pleonastic spelling mistakes. All at once I know that my struggle is useless. As I slip into a dull stupor I know that this is going to be a Vampire Presentation.

“Why?...” I think, as my shoulders sag and my eyelids turn to lead, “but.. why?...”

Presentations are an integral part of our lives. Although a (lucky?) few people may have managed to escape ever having to sit through another presentation when they left high school, for most of us we are stuck with them. Whether it be the weekly progress presentation at work, presentation of our ideas for books to our reading group, or an impromptu call-for-action to a group of our friends, we spend a huge amount of time watching and performing presentations.

But why are they often so blood-suckingly boring?

We are spoiled these days by captivating, interesting presentations on such platforms as TED, theRSA and others. Stand up comedy is hugely popular all over the world, with new quality acts making it to our TV screens every year.

But all this access to so much “good speaking” doesn't seem to be trickling down into our own presentations. 

Recently I've been looking at my own presentations and trying to figure out: What's the difference between what I'm doing and what these "professionals" at TED are doing? How can I avoid giving Vampire Presentations? What are my major points for improvement?

For one thing, in my experience, “just getting the words out” is enough of a challenge when I give some presentations. This is particularly true when:

1. I haven’t practised enough, or at all. (e.g. because I have only just finished botching together the powerpoint slides)
2. I’ve written the presentation a long time ago and have not refreshed it recently. 

In other words: Preparation. 

But preparation does not just mean reading through your slides, this practice should be deliberate and aimed at improving specifics (as they say:  "It's better to practice deeply for 10 minutes than practice shallowly for an hour"). 

You see point number 2 happening a lot in academia - a lecturer writes his presentation shortly after finishing his PhD, just before he gives up doing any real work, and then a decade later he’s still dusting off the same slides every so often to do the same talk for some poor hapless audience.

In fact, it is during such a presentation that I’m writing this blog post. The Speaker’s speech is packed with dull “urm”s and “yah”s as he fishes in his dusty memory for the slide's corresponding spiel. He reads the text-packed slides out to us, word-by-word, which we would be quicker reading ourselves. To rub salt into the bite, almost all of the audience already know this topic, as he gave us exactly the same presentation at the same event last year - including the same flat jokes and spelling mistakes in the slides.

Someone asks a question and he responds with a badly prepared “pre-spun” answer to some entirely different question and then ploughs on with the rest of the slide.

Do presentations have to be like this? Well..the simple answer is: No.

There are many great speakers out there - and many mediocre speakers can give enthralling presentations in the right circumstances. Have you never wondered why TED talks are so good?... Neither had I until I wrote this article. Do you think that all of the hundreds of speakers on TED give such enthralling presentations in other environments? Well... maybe, but I would argue that not all of them are “naturally gifted” speakers, and storytellers. As you can see from their guidelines for preparing speakers, each TED talk goes through a process of assisted editing before the event. As the speaker guide says, the speaker is encouraged to focus on storytelling and how to give a good talk. The actual information they give is almost secondary.

Therefore: Aim for the story, not for the facts.

You could argue that such storytelling is not possible with “dry” or technical subjects, but in my experience this is simply not true. I have seen many great and interesting presentations in very technical topics and the good ones are always down to a good speaker.

So what can we do about it? How can we be that good speaker and not suck the interest from our audience with vampire presentations?

For a start, lets try and learn from those hundreds of great speakers that we see online. Emulate the the things we like from their talks. Lets also commit to practising better for our presentations, focussing on story and presentation and less on the facts we want to get out.
I, for one, hate to think that I might be one of those people who gives Vampire Presentations, so I'm going to start right now.

pleo·nastic adj.

from ple·o·nasm n.

1. 1. The use of more words than are required to express an idea; redundancy.
   2. An instance of pleonasm.
2. A superfluous word or phrase.

Ok, thanks.