- You have your goal, you have your message,
you've defined your audience.
The next step is to create an outline.
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The outline is going to allow you to flesh out
what's the content that's going to go into your talk.
- The outline can take so many shapes and forms.
There are so many ways to go from ideas to slides.
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So, the first thing I do is just start writing an outline,
writing things out really helps me to clarify my thinking.
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Once I have my detailed outline,
then I start to build out the slides.
- I, personally, don't sit down
and write out what my messages are.
I use my slides as that outline or that storyboard.
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After I have a rough draft of the images
and the text that I wanna have on my slides
then I start iterating on them and polishing them.
- The storyboard in the context of your slides
is really just, sort of, a visual representation
of your slides.
It's, actually, how I build my outline.
I, literally, have my notebook, I have a pen and paper,
I just start drawing out.
I draw a little square then I, sort of, draw some squiggles.
It's nothing fancy, it's not like an Avengers storyboard
that you might have seen at Comic-Con.
- I basically just let it flow.
Sometimes I outline, sometimes I type-in phrases.
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And I'm just writing, sort of, free association,
steam of consciousness and then I will start
slowly building up the slides to support that.
- I used to type out a script for my presentation.
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I have a running monologue in my head
of how I want the story to go.
I would look at what I said on the script
and make sure that it fits what's on the slide.
If they didn't go together, either,
I had to change the script or I had to change the slides.
- Most of my thinking happens in Power Point.
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It's mostly text and it's mostly bullet point lists.
So, I break the slide deck down into three different parts.
So, the first part is the introduction.
Then there's, kind of, the meat of the content,
so all the data.
And the third part is the conclusions section.
Then I'll break it down slide-by-slide
as to what I would want these slides to have
and what kinds of information would be relevant.
As I started by adding more slides
I recognized there was something that I missed before.
And then I would go back and rework that outline
and then rework the slides that I made.
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- It's gonna be an iterative process.
So, you're not, necessarily going to go in order
of the different parts of the talk, you might,
but you might actually start in the middle.
Here are the three experiments that are critical
for my audience to understand my work.
And then you're gonna think back, maybe to the introduction
and you're gonna say, all right what's the background?
So, that they can really understand those three experiments
and why I did them.
Then you might go to your conclusion
and say, here are my three main discoveries.
But you might go back and then tweak the introduction.
- You have the data in mind
when you're building your outline.
Since the data goes in the body of your talk
you, kinda know, what the story is going to be about
and this will help you determine what is going to go
in your introduction and what is going to go
in the conclusion, or the ending of your talk.
- Depending on how long your talk is,
you're gonna have to make sometimes really tough decisions
about what kind of information you're going to include.
You're never going to be able to tell people
about all of the interesting things that you're doing.
But as you're moving through the process
of going from goals, message and audience,
to outline, more detailed outline of,
here's the actual information that I wanna to include,
here are the points that I wanna make to then, slide.
Constantly ask yourself, what's essential?
Like, what information is essential for my audience
to understand that core message that you've defined.
And for you to meet the goals
that you have fleshed out for your talk.
- The whole process of giving a talk is this real iteration.
You're moving from something that's entirely
in your head into something you're speaking out loud.
- You really just need to do what works best for you.
Develop a system for designing your presentation
that really fits your own needs.
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