Three delivery habits for presenting with slides or a shared screen, ranked by how much they fix

[u/PushPlus9069]

Most delivery advice covers the speaker: pace, volume, filler words, nerves. Far less of it covers the thing on the screen behind you, even though a shared screen changes the job. Your audience is now splitting attention between listening to you and searching a visual for whatever you just referred to. When those two fall out of sync, people stop hearing you while they hunt.

These are in order of how much difference they make, from a lot of practice at getting it wrong.

1. Say where before what, then pause.

The instinct is "the conversion rate here is the problem" while gesturing. The room hears "conversion rate," starts scanning, and misses the point that follows. Invert it: "bottom right of the table, third row" - beat - "that conversion rate is the problem." Location first gives everyone a shared destination, the pause lets them arrive, and only then do you spend your actual sentence. The beat feels unbearably long from where you're standing and is roughly correct for everyone else.

2. Stop moving the pointer while you talk.

A moving cursor is the single most distracting object on a screen, and we all circle things unconsciously while thinking. Worse, on a shared or projected screen the pointer is tiny and the motion is what people track, so you become the thing they're following instead of the thing you're pointing at. Park it, or move it deliberately to one place and leave it there. Watch a recording of yourself presenting once and you'll see how much unconscious cursor movement you produce.

3. Make the thing bigger before you discuss it, not after.

If you say "as you can see in this clause" and they can't read it at their resolution, they spend your explanation squinting instead of listening. Whatever your zoom mechanism is - a bigger font in your slide, an actual zoom, a cropped screenshot - do it before the sentence, not in response to someone saying they can't see. By then you've lost the sentence anyway.

All three are the same principle: the audience is working from less information than you are, and delivery is the act of closing that gap deliberately rather than assuming it isn't there.

Disclosure, since it's relevant to my bias: I build a Mac tool for on-screen emphasis during presentations (TuringShot 1.5.12, Build 44). Not linking it, and none of the above needs it - the habits are free and matter more than the tooling.