By Jay ShahThe best presentations come from the best rehearsals and preparation. Unfortunately, that’s the part that almost everyone skips. This guide goes through how to prepare for the presentation, the proper way, and a few tips and tricks from our team.
The short version
- Don’t make slides first. Start by drafting rough notes, then rehearse out loud and create sentences on the spot.
- Time each run and see where you spent the most amount of your time. Modify the jot notes, and run it again.
- Slides are support, not the star. Design them last, after the talk works without them.
- A tip from our Founder: rehearsing from notes in an ugly font (like Comic Sans instead of Times New Roman) can help you remember it better.
- Warm up your voice before you walk on. This helps you sound natural and confident.
Why do most presentations fall flat?
Most presentations fail for a simple reason: people rehearse the slides instead of the talk. They spend hours on design, then read the slides to the room. The audience can read faster than you can talk, so the second you start reading your slides, you’ve made yourself redundant.
The speakers who look effortless aren’t winging it. They’ve rehearsed … a lot. Jill Bolte Taylor practiced her TED talk 200 times before she gave it (Carmine Gallo, Forbes). TED coaches its speakers to treat slides as a sparse, image-heavy backdrop, never a teleprompter (Nancy Duarte). The difference between a great presenter and a painful one usually isn’t talent, it’s practice.
Rehearse before you design
Here’s the loop our team uses.
- Draft jot notes, not a script. List the points you want to hit, in order. Don’t write full sentences yet.
- Rehearse out loud, with no practice. Talk through it with nothing in front of you. This is the part people skip because it feels uncomfortable. It’s also the whole point. You’re forcing yourself to build the sentences on the spot, exactly like how you’d say it naturally (instead of a perfected written copy).
- Time it and review it. Note how long each section took. Was the balance right, or was the intro confusing? Where did you stumble? Which part did you blank on? Did the ending give people something to think about, or at least a summary?
- Modify your jot notes and practice again. Adjust the balance, visualize a hook for the section you keep forgetting, and go. Repeat until you can carry on the presentation like a one-sided conversation.
- Build mental memory hooks for things you forget. If you’re consistently forgetting some sections, visualize a trigger image. It could be an item that related to the content of that section, or the first sentence of how you start it.
- Design the slides, but only at the end. Once you’re comfortable with the talk, pick the two or three moments you want to emphasize the most, and build the slides around those.
Notes or a full script?
For almost everyone, jot notes win. Listening to speakers just reading from a full script is boring for the audience, and the moment you lose your place, you panic. Instead, keep a list of jot notes to trigger your memory. The exception is a tightly timed formal speaking event, or an MC, where you need the exact wording and clean transitions. There, use a script. Everywhere else, notes.
Slides are support, not the star
Will the deck get sent to the audience afterwards, or only presented live? If people will read it on their own later, make it standalone, with enough context to understand on its own. If it’s only for the live audience, put the major points up (or images) and nothing more.
A tip from the founder: Use Comic Sans
Here’s a tip from our Founder that sounds like a joke but isn’t. When he prints his rehearsal notes, he sets them in an ugly font, usually Comic Sans instead of something clean like Times New Roman. His theory is that since it looks unusual, your brain slows down and actually processes the words instead of skimming past them.
There’s research behind it. In a 2011 study in the journal Cognition, students who read material in harder-to-read fonts, Comic Sans among them, remembered more than students who read the same material in a clean, easy font (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer and Vaughan, 2011). The effect is called a desirable difficulty. Making the encoding a little harder can make the memory stick.
Warm up before you walk on
Singers warm up. Speakers almost never do, but should. Before you present, take two minutes to run your voice from low to high, hit a few different pitches, and say a couple of sentences out loud. Treat it like you’re going through the first-minute nerves in private instead of in front of the audience.
Want Presentation Practice? Use TrackPoint
Practicing for Presentations is one of the benefits of TrackPoint. You can upload or record your presentation right on the website, get feedback on how to improve, and even practice Q&A with AI audience members.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many times should you rehearse a presentation?
More than once, and out loud. The best TED speakers rehearse dozens of times, and some far more. For a normal work presentation, aim for enough practice that you can start the presentation from midway, without your notes, and still get to the end.
Should you memorize a presentation word for word?
No, unless you’re hosting or reading a tightly timed copy. Memorizing words makes you brittle, and one slip sends you scrambling. Keep jot notes handy and form the sentences live, so you can recover when something goes sideways (or if you lose your spot in the script).
Do your slides need to match your notes?
Slides should support the talk, not repeat it. Put just the major points and visuals on the slides. If the slides will be shared to the audience later, make the slides standalone. Otherwise, your slides should always be secondary to you, not make you redundant.
Presentations are a skill you build by rehearsing, not a talent you’re born with. That’s exactly what TrackPoint is for. Talk to our team to see how your people can rehearse presentations before the big moment, or start free and practice for presentations yourself.
