Overview

I think from all I hear [that] I was a very difficult lecturer. I started as a lecturer who made things very difficult. I had some help; I remember [Wolfgang] Pauli's advice, almost certainly in '28. He said, When you want to give a seminar or lecture, decide what it is you want to talk about and then find some agreeable subject of contemplation not remotely related to your lecture and then interrupt that from time to time to say a few words. So you can see how bad it must have been. ^[1]

J. Robert Oppenheimer

How many times have you seen a presenter project a title slide and then quickly remove it before you had the chance to fathom what the presentation was really about? Or how many times have you had a presenter overwhelm you with an outline list of presentation topics, more than half of which you were unable to remember not one minute after the mapping slide had been removed? Such are the trademarks of presentations in which the presenter leaves the audience behind at the beginning.

Becoming lost at the beginning of a presentation is frustrating for audiences. When the presentation format does not allow for questions until the end or when the size of the audience inhibits the audience from asking for clarification, becoming lost at the beginning often means that the time spent at that presentation is wasted. For that reason, presenters should make it a goal to make the beginning...