How to Present to a Live Audience - Interaction with the audience

I think the key ingredient, what I like to do is to tell a story. And you want to tell a story where the audience will want to hear the end and they also want to hear how you got to the end. So you can start either by posing a problem and trying to engage them to think about how they would do it or make them interested in learning how I do it. How we get to the end result. And it's telling a story. So it's a flow. It's a beginning and you go through it. It's like a movie really. Go, play a movie. It is not good to have... to stick too long to do one slide, because often, me and the audience, I will read through the slide in a minute and then I'm eager to move on but the presenter may still be there. going through, walking through slowly, all details in the slide and then I'm a bit lost. I lose concentration and start thinking about my cell phone. So instead it's better to have a pace and feed new information constantly. So you, at any point, at every stage, you keep the attention of the audience. I like to think simple and there is nothing new here in the sense. I stick to what Aristoteles taught us a long time ago, about ethos, pathos and logos. So a good presentation needs all three of these things. You need the ethos, which is sort of giving you credibility. The pathos is your audience's interest. The passion for what you're talking about. And then the logos which is the technical aspect of it. So the arguments. You can't come there with only technique and think you win your audience. You need the passion as well and you need the credibility, the ethos. That is not very easy, because often you are on up on a podium, you are remote from the audience, but of course you notice when people start walking out of the room and you notice if there's blue screens between the chairs, but and also if it's getting really quiet that's usually not good. So what can you do with it? I do often have back-up slides. So if there are slides with a lot of details you can choose to zoom through them or not to do them at all. Or you can keep them in. It's a question of finding the right level of technicality for your audience. So sometimes you're just over their head, and then you have to dumb down. Other times you can just skip slides. So if you want to dump down, then you might have cartoon slides somewhere in order to explain in more detail what you're doing.