I made this Haiku Deck for my students at Texas Christian University, but others may find it useful, especially other students. This is my first try at a Haiku Deck, but I have a fair bit of experience presenting to different types of audiences using other technologies (Keynote, beamer, whiteboards). All of the photos were downloaded from iStockphoto.

I think of these as the "3 Cs of Effective Presentations," and use them to frame the first half of this slide deck. I chose this photo because the words are centered over the statue's eye, which suggests focus, or vision. If students (and others) focus on the 3 Cs, they have a good chance of making an effective presentation.

For students, in particular, mastering the content is the essential first step when preparing for an effective presentation. One of the most common presentation errors, reading your slides, is often a simple consequence of students (or others) not having mastered the material they are about to present. There are other reasons students might read their slides, including anxiety, inexperience, or ignorance about what makes a good presentation, but it is difficult to tackle these other issues if a student hasn't first mastered the content.

Let's say a student has been asked by her professor to give a presentation on "systems thinking." The first step, conveyed by the previous slide, is to study the concept, so that she has a good grasp of what is meant by "systems thinking." The next step is to consider the context: What does my audience need to get out of this? What am I trying to achieve? How much time do I have? How can I capitalize on the physical layout, including whatever technology happens to be present? Her answers to these questions will determine a lot about her presentation.

One of the most common mistakes I have seen, made by professionals as well as students, is to give a presentation that doesn't give the audience what it needs. For example, in the case of a class presentation, where a students is presenting to her peers over an article they are going to read themselves, it wouldn't be very helpful to try and cover all of the details (or even a subset) in a 15 or 20 minute presentation. However, it might be a good idea to give an overview (sometimes called an "advanced organizer"), a synthesis, or some interesting examples.

As a general rule, a failure to consider context can be just as fatal to a presentation as is a failure to master the content.

In my experience, there are three main types of audiences: lay persons (e.g., parents), students (e.g., psychology majors), and professionals (e.g., psychologists). Effective presentations given to these different audiences would most likely differ in a number of ways (e.g., in the use of technical terms, and length of the presentation).

In terms of time, there are also three main types of presentations: short presentations (15-20 minutes), long presentations (1-2 hours), and lectures/discussions that are part of a course. In my view, the design principles that make each of these formats an effective experience for the audience would also be quite different. For example, many college professors are returning to the whiteboard for classroom lectures, but still use slides for professional presentations.

This Haiku Deck is focused on short presentations, given by students to an audience of their peers.
One of the first things I ask students when discussing an article is, "What is the author trying to do in this article?" This might be a suitable goal for a short, in-class presentation to one's peers.

Presentations (lectures) have been common in academia for centuries, and they are becoming increasingly common in the professions (one estimate is that professionals on average experience one presentation each day they work). As presentations have become more common, so have the technologies that support them (e.g., Keynote, overhead projectors, iClickers). Further, there are a growing number experts, and this slide identifies three of my favorites: Garr Reynolds, Guy Kawasaki, and Edward Tufte. I have chosen these three in part for their individual excellence, but also because they represent three very different perspectives or approaches to presentation practice. (The chambered nautilus in the photo suggests that if you study these three "gurus," you will grow as a presenter.)

Garr Reynolds is the author of Presentation Zen (great overview of general presentation principles), PresentationZen Design (graphic design for your slides), and The Naked Presenter (not about your slides, but your delivery). He also has a great website (search for it - I can't link to it in these notes), which includes a "Presentation Tips" section. He breaks these tips down into three stages: Prepare, Design, Deliver (as shown in my slide). Each section has a number of really good tips for effective presentations. In my view, Garr Reynolds is the best resource for the fundamentals of giving effective presentations.

A warning to students: It is often the case that your professional discipline (e.g., psychology) will have traditions and practices that conflict with the principles Garr Reynolds (and others) advocate. This is in part due to the fact that professional disciplines are conservative, slow to change, and are not in touch with outside developments relevant to good scientific communication. However, this conflict is also in part due to the fact that scientific communication is typically data-driven, which can call for a different set of criteria for effective presentation (see Edward Tufte).

Guy Kawasaki used to work for Apple, but now is a freelance designer, consultant, author, and blogger. If you do a web search, you will find his blog, "How to Change the World." Guy has written an extremely useful blog post, "The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint," which is the inspiration for my slide (you can search for "10-20-30 rule" and find a number of hits, it is popular). If I were to give this Haiku Deck as a 20 minute presentation, it would conform to the 10/20/30 rule: There are 10 slides, the presentation would last for 20 minutes, and all of the text is 30 point font or larger. This simple rule would have eliminated many, if not most, of the bad student (and professional) presentations that I have seen over the years.

Guy has also been involved with a graphical design startup, Canva (search for it on the web), which allows novices (like me) to produce nice graphical elements for blogs, presentations, and other info media. You may have noticed that each of the slides in this Haiku Deck has a photo background, which is something I learned from Garr Reynolds. In the future, I think the use of graphical elements will become increasingly more common. Canva gives "the masses" the ability to create effective graphics, without the overhead associated with many commercial products.

Like the others, Edward Tufte has a really cool website, where can you see (and buy) all kinds of amazing stuff. He is the author of four books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence. (I chose the photo background for this slide because it reminded me of some images found in Beautiful Evidence.) He is a prominent speaker, and has also written a monograph on presentations, called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within," which is a scathing attack on the most common forms of presentation practice.

Along with some other professionals, Tufte has developed a style for slides and handouts, that is based on LaTeX, which is what I use for most of my writing and presenting. You can find the style by searching on the web for "Tufte Handout Template." The handout template works well with beamer, which is another LaTeX-based package, that can be used to produce well-designed and effective slides. You can find it by searching for "latex beamer."

Well, this is the last slide, and the end of my little Haiku Deck. My sincere hope is that you can use the 3Cs to focus your efforts, and continue to grow with the three gurus. Becoming a good presenter is a life-long process, and what is most important is that you do in fact continue to learn and grow. Well, almost most important: What is actually most important is that you have some fun, even in class.

:-)