How I Write Timed Talks

This is one of those blog posts that started life as a tweet, and then a tweet thread, and quickly grew to a point where it actually makes more sense as a post. It started out with this:

So, hereā€™s how I do it.

First: figure out how fast you talk. In my case, I took some videos of a couple of talks Iā€™ve given that went well, and transcribed them - literally word for word, number for number. Every single word. Then I measured the word and character counts compared to the length of the videos. I talk at almost exactly 1,000 characters per minute - which works out around 178 words per minute, give or take.

Thatā€™s useful, because it means I can easily turn a time limit into a word limit. A 5-minute lightning talk needs about 5,000 characters worth of material - just under 1,000 words. A one-hour keynote talk needs roughly 60,000 characters.

Second: learn how to write the way you speak. This can take a while, but itā€™s a really useful skill to develop. When I write talks, I write them exactly the way I talk when Iā€™m talking - jokes, contractions, I spell out numbers long form (262,144 is only six characters on a word count, but ā€œtwo hundred and sixty two thousand, one hundred and forty fourā€ takes about four seconds to say out loud).

Iā€™m not writing a script - what I actually say on the day probably correlates about 50% with what I wrote - but they include all the important bits. The key statistics and figures, the important points (and how I want to phrase them), the punchlines to the jokes. Think of it like the score for a jazz standard - the intro, the melody, the refrain and the ending are all pretty clearly mapped out, but they leave structured spaces for improvisation.

Sometimes, at this point, I just start writing. Not necessarily at the beginning - Iā€™ll often start writing in the middle, Iā€™ll put in placeholders and headings, Iā€™ll move things around. If I know Iā€™m using prerecorded video clips during the talk, Iā€™ll check the durations of these and adjust the word limit accordingly. Other times, Iā€™ll map out the talk into chunks:

  • Intro: 5 minutes (5,000 characters / 950 words)
  • History of radio, signal processing: 15 minutes (15,000 characters / 2,880 words)
  • Digital cameras & JPEG compression: 15 minutes (15,000 characters / 2,880 words)
  • Unicode, text encoding: 10 minutes (10,000 characters / 1,920 words)
  • Conclusions and wrap up: 5 minutes (5,000 characters / 950 words)

Iā€™ll keep writing and editing and tweaking until I have something thatā€™s about the right length. Then Iā€™ll record myself reading it out loud. This is normally where a bunch of things jump out that sounded good on paperā€¦ so Iā€™ll tweak and edit some more.

Then Iā€™ll go through the whole thing and identify the points where I need a slide. Sometimes Iā€™ll talk for 2-3 minutes around a single image; sometimes Iā€™ll literally have a slide or animation for each word in a sentence. Sometimes a line or two becomes the storyboard for a piece of animation Iā€™ll create.

Then Iā€™ll fire up an empty Powerpoint presentation, and for each chunk of prose that accompanies a slide, Iā€™ll paste that chunk of text onto the Notes area on the slide and put in a one-line placeholder (ā€œPICTURE OF ELEPHANT HEREā€, ā€œANIMATION ABOUT 16QAM HEREā€) as the slide heading. Thatā€™ll let me start using Powerpointā€™s outline view to navigate around. Finally, Iā€™ll go through each slide and add the relevant images, text, titles, video clips - whateverā€™s needed to support that part of the talk.

image-20200709180850917

For each slide, Iā€™ll also add a few bullet points in the speaker notes summarizing what I need to say - and what I need to end with for the transition to the next slide to make sense.

Then Iā€™ll do a ā€œdress rehearsalā€ - run through the whole thing, check the timings, transitions, animations, make sure my own speaker notes make sense - and Iā€™m good to go.

Untitled Project

Using <a href="https://agendadefender.app/>AgendaDefender.app</a> to keep track of time during a talk

When Iā€™m actually giving a talk, Iā€™ll use a tool I built called Agenda Defender to stay on track with timing - Iā€™ll put in the actual start times for each section of the talk, and Agenda Defender draws live animated progress bars for each section of the talk so I can tell whether I need to speed up a bit, or have time for a bit of audience Q&A, maybe throw in a few jokes or stories that werenā€™t in the original talk outline.

Thatā€™s pretty much it. A couple of things to add:

  • The first time I deliver a new talk, I normally donā€™t refer to the notes at all - itā€™s all fresh in my mind. But the notes are invaluable if youā€™re invited to give the same talk again six months later and need to refresh your memory.
  • Breaking down the talk structure into timed sections makes it almost ā€œmodularā€ - if you need to adapt a 45-minute talk to fit a 30-minute time slot, sometimes thereā€™s literally a chunk you can just cut out and tweak the rest a bit to make it flow across the gap.
  • When I first started out, I used the 2-minutes-per-slide approach - for a 60 minute talk, I need to make 30 slides, then for each slide, come up with 2 minutes of content for it. I worked like that for a year or two and absolutely hated it.
  • A one-hour talk is about 10,000 words. Thatā€™s the same length as an undergraduate dissertation at many UK universities. Preparing talks this way is a lot of work - I normally reckon on about 30-50 hours of prep time from the first rough outline to the having the talk ā€œstage ready.ā€

And for the sake of comparison, this blog post is 1,156 words - itā€™d make a pretty good 5-minute lightning talk with a bit of trimming - and itā€™s taken me just over 45 minutes to write it. Maybe I should just have replied on Twitter after allā€¦ :)