Public Speaking Advice /

Why Do My Presentations Suck? and Related Questions

• October 8, 2025
• advice  
• public speaking  
• presentations  
• speaking  
• talks  

Look, I’ve watched so many terrible presentations at this point that I couldn’t put off writing this anymore, so here, have this imagined Q&A. If you feel attacked by any of these questions, I’m sorry. I’m nicer in real life, I promise. In my defence, this post was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek, and it’s not targeted at anyone in particular.

If you want straight advice (read: you don’t want to wade through the sarcasm), I have other posts about this topic, which you can read here.

Why do my presentations suck?

I’m not sure. I haven’t seen any of your presentations, so for all I know, they might actually be fine. However, it’s worth pointing out that there are many, many different ways for a presentation to be bad.

What are some different ways for presentations to be bad?

Here are some different ways for a presentation to be bad. Note that this is a non-exhaustive list. People are always finding new and creative ways to give terrible presentations.

In general:

• Presentations where the speaker clearly never practiced and is visibly trying to figure out how to organize their presentation as they do it. Please don’t do this.

• Presentations where the slides are walls of text and the speaker is clearly reading from the slide. This is insulting on two levels: first of all, the audience can read, and second of all, if you’re going to make us read a bunch of text, give us a nicely formatted report or something. Slides are not meant to be read and we don’t want to read all that from a distance.

• Presentations where there is almost no text on the slide and the speaker is clearly reading from the slide. If you have nothing to say, why are you here?

• Presentations where the speaker jumps straight into technical details without giving an overview, introduction, or motivation of what the talk is about. Even highly technical talks delivered to a highly technical audience need to be contextualized. And if your audience isn’t highly technical and you’re trying to pull this nonsense, what are you doing??

• Presentations where the speaker is visibly confused by their own slides. Please don’t include slides if you’re not 100% confident in the material that’s on them. No one will take you seriously if you’re confused by the material that you presumably wrote.

• Presentations where the speaker is mumbling all the way through the talk. We are here to listen to you. If we can’t hear you and your words are blurring together, we will probably check out and start thinking about (or even doing) something else.

• Presentations that meander with no sense of purpose, story, or topic. As the presenter, you should be taking your audience on a journey to understand something new, or perhaps to see something they already understand in a new light. If you keep jumping around from topic to topic with absolutely no sense of internal logic typing things together, you will frustrate your audience.

• Presentations where the speaker clearly has no idea what they’re talking about. Incompetence never, ever looks good on a speaker.

• Presentations where the slides are overly loud and/or visually distracting. I have seen slideshows filled with animations, neon colours, obnoxious highlighting, busy (and irrelevant) graphics, busy backgrounds, and so on. Unless you are a child learning how to use PowerPoint for the first time,¹ do not be this person.

• Presentations where the content currently on the slides has no relationship to what is being said in the presentation. Your slides should support your talk, not confuse it.

• Presentations where there are no slides and the presenter clearly hasn’t thought about what they’re going to say or write on the board. Yes, it looks impressive when someone gives a flawless talk from memory with no external aids. But if you clearly can’t do that yet, an outline won’t kill you.

• Presentations that are poorly paced, or, alternatively, where multiple sections of the presentation exist at the wrong level of detail. For example, if you are giving a presentation to a group of experts on a certain topic, maybe you shouldn’t spend half of your talk on background information.

• Presentations where the speaker is simply regurgitating info that the audience members either already know or would be happy to just google. Know your audience. No one likes a presentation that feels like a waste of time.

Some specific cases I’ve seen:

• Research talks where the hypothesis and methodology were never stated anywhere but the conclusion makes reference to the hypothesis. We need to understand what your goals were so that we can understand what you actually did.

• Math presentations where the speaker has taken screenshots directly from their paper (or report, if they’re a student) and proceeds to ramble through their proofs in a completely unenlightening way. If your talk is shorter than 20 minutes and it has a proof in it, it probably contains too many proofs. It would probably take you 20 minutes just to explain the entire proof, which leaves you with what? Zero minutes to explain what the hell the talk is about? If your talk is shorter than 20 minutes and it contains more than one proof in it, you’re either going to run out of time or confuse your audience. The goal of a math talk is generally to present high-level techniques and ideas, not detailed proofs and equations. That’s what the report or paper is for.

• Math presentations where the speaker hasn’t figured out whether they’re going to use slides or a backboard and keeps haphazardly switching between the two during the talk. It’s okay to mix the two, but it’s hard to do it well, and the correct time to sort out how you will pull it off is not while you are presenting.

• Technical presentations that are full of hyper-specialized jargon and notation that only the people who worked on the project understand. If you created a tool and a bunch of specific vocabulary that applies to that tool, great! Congratulations on creating something new and (maybe?) useful. Now consider the fact that the only people who will have any clue what your terminology means are your collaborators, and your audience will largely consist of people who are not your collaborators.

• Technical presentations that are filled with slides that contain multiple small, unreadable, and unclear graphs, tables, or charts. Bonus points if most or all of the figures are unlabeled. Why someone would choose to put eight graphs on one slide with minimal context is beyond me; it’s a great way to confuse the heck out of the audience.

How do I avoid my presentation being bad?

Don’t do any of those things.

But I’m not doing any of those things!

Are you sure?

Whenever I do presentations, the entire audience just blankly stares at me. Why do they do this?

They’re either bored to death or confused, or possibly both.

I’m tired of these stupid audience members! Why do they keep asking me dumb questions?

First of all, I would really caution you against assuming that your audience members are stupid under any circumstances, and I would especially avoid assuming this if they’re asking questions. If someone asks you a question, it means they were actually listening to your talk.

Secondly, if multiple audience members are asking you “dumb” questions, it’s because you failed at doing your job in some way. Your job is to communicate your ideas to the audience. If people are asking you basic questions about your ideas, it’s either because you did a bad job of explaining the basics required to understand your ideas or because you didn’t bother to explain them at all.

Look, you can’t just assume people will know things; something being obvious to you doesn’t make it obvious to everyone else. The first few slides of your presentation should be for getting everyone on the same page.

But my audience is stupid. Why shouldn’t I assume they’re stupid?

The audience isn’t stupid, they just happen to know a lot less about this topic than you. Which, by the way, is why you’re giving this presentation in the first place.

Assuming your audience is stupid is bad because it leads to you talking down to them, which is not only irritating but doesn’t actually help them understand the context any better. Also, giving a presentation is generally a good way to advertise yourself as a great and competent person to work with, and being condescending is a great way to come off as an arrogant jerk that no one will want to work with.

But hey, it’s your brain. I can’t tell you what to think. You do you (at your own risk).

What do you mean by “getting on the same page” as the audience?

This means signaling at what level of detail or complexity the presentation will be happening, going over any preliminaries or background knowledge required, explaining the reasons for and the context around your talk, and so on.

Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum, and they’re poorly absorbed when they’re presented inside a vacuum. The entire point of doing this introduction/motivation/background/why-are-we-doing-this stuff is to create enough of a world around your ideas that your audience has something familiar to build on top of.

By doing this, you also signal who you think your presentation is for – the types of analogies you choose, the type of context you give, and the type of motivations you cite will all appeal to people with different experience and expertise levels. If you signal that you’re going to be giving a beginner-level talk and you start using expert-level jargon, that’s a failing on your part. If you signal that you’re going to be giving an expert-level talk and give an expert-level talk, then beginners in the audience aren’t going to feel cheated… unless that is, you were actually supposed to give a beginner talk, but didn’t, which again, would be a failure on your part.

As always, know your audience.

How do I get better at communicating my ideas?

Write them out. Try to structure them in an order that either makes logical, thematic, or narrative sense. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the people you’ll be communicating with and write for them, not you. Try to imagine where they’re coming from and what their backgrounds are, and use that as a familiar baseline you can build on. Imagine what might confuse them or what questions they might have, and try to fill those gaps. Try to think about what they’ll be interested in or want to know about, and angle your presentation in that direction. When people tell you something is confusing, try to rephrase it so they’re not confused anymore.

Look, I’m not saying that your thoughts, preferences, or ideas don’t matter – they do, but communication is a lot like collaborating with an imagined composite person. To a large extent, it’s about bridging gaps and making compromises so that your ideas can be understood and disseminated amongst more.

It’s a skill, I guess. Go practice.

How do I get better at public speaking?

You get better at public speaking through practicing public speaking. I’m sorry, but there is just no way around it. I would suggest volunteering to give presentations every time such an opportunity comes up, no matter how terrifying you think it is. Seek feedback, act on it, and don’t take it personally.

Doing activities that will force you to talk in front of people on a regular basis will probably also help. I did debate for a year and Model UN for another three years, which I think was invaluable. I hear that improv also helps. I haven’t tried it, but I believe it.

Also, I hate to say this one again, but get better at writing. I know that some technical people think this skill is useless and is best delegated to [insert generative AI tool here], but they’re wrong. Writing well means being better at structuring ideas, which generally means being a more eloquent person, which generally means being better at public speaking. It’s weird how skills can be transferable like that.

How should I practice my presentations?

Convince some unsuspecting victims (read: your friends) to sit through your presentation and stop you every time they don’t understand something, if you can. If you don’t have access to any victims, well, it’s time to develop some skills in empathy and become your own best self-critic. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and think about whether or not the way you’re presenting the information will make sense to them.

I also highly recommend videotaping your practice sessions and watching them back. You learn all sorts of fun things that way, and videotaping your practice makes it feel more “real” than if you just walk through your talk with no audience in the room, because you can’t take as many mental shortcuts – stumbling, confusion, inadequate topic sequencing, and gaps in your knowledge all become glaring when videotaped. It’ll help you understand where the problems are in your presentation, and you might even be able to test out different fixes to them in real time.

Oh, and try to practice in the same type of room that you’ll be presenting in at least once (or at least, as close to the same type of room as you can get). Presenting in a lecture hall is very, very different from mumbling through slides in your bedroom.

What on earth am I supposed to put on my slides?

Highlights of your talk, I guess. The most salient sentences or ideas that you don’t want people to forget should go on slides. Any really important or memorable statistics can go on slides.

Slides can also be used for supporting information, especially in the form of supporting visuals. Charts, figures, data, and pictures are the common examples of these, but sometimes tables, videos, screenshots, or other types of visual information are also used. Make sure they’re clean and uncluttered and try to stick to one of these per slide.

Actually, keeping it to one main idea per slide is a pretty good rule of thumb in general. If your slide encompasses more than one idea, it’s probably cluttered, text-heavy, or otherwise a terrible slide.

Wait a sec, why do you think you’re qualified to give me advice?

I don’t. People ask me for it anyway.

Do you have any other advice?

Didn’t you just ask me…

Anyway, yes. Go watch this talk. If you’re in a quantitative field, read this article as well, and if you’re in a technical field, also read this set of notes.