How to use notes and still look like an expert
You want to buy a car, so you walk into a car showroom. The salesperson shows you “the best vehicle you can buy” and then he starts reading out the specs, the optional extras and all the cool things about the car from a piece of paper. That’s right! He’s using notes!
At this point your brain goes “This guys is not an expert. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Why should I trust him or listen to what he’s saying?”
Now, imagine you’re giving a presentation about your product. You keep reading notes because you can’t remember what to say next. How do you think your audience will react to it?
Notes are evil
Ideally, you want to get rid of notes in your presentation. That doesn’t mean you have to memorize every single word (you are not an actor), but you should know how to start, the order of the slides, what you want to say on each slide and how to end.
This requires practice and effort, but in return your presentation will be smooth, more interesting and you will be perceived as someone who knows his stuff.
But Giuseppe, what if I don’t have the time or the will to do so?
Ok, fine, you can use notes! But at least be smart about it!
You don’t want to be seen reading notes over and over again. Ideally, your audience should be unaware of the facts that you are getting help from notes.
Notes should only be used as a safety net, something to peek at if you suddenly forget what to say.
Slides as support
As we learned in another article the most effective slides consist of images, videos, keywords, and beautiful graphs. This means that a glance at the screen will remind you what to say next. It works particularly well if you have your laptop or a secondary screen in front of you so that you can even see the upcoming slide without breaking the eye contact with your audience.

Please note that this will only work if you don’t have much text in your slides, otherwise it will take more than a glance to read it and the whole trick fails.
Written notes
In case glancing at your slides is not enough and you need written notes, there are few things I suggest.
First, make them short. Keywords or brief sentences should be sufficient so that you can quickly read them without breaking the flow of your presentation.
Second, make them small. If you walk on the stage with a big notepad and you start reading from it, you will immediately be perceived as boring. Moreover, you don’t need a big pad if you keep your notes short. By short, I mean only use keywords. This way you can have notes as small and handy as business cards.
Third, try to keep your audience unaware. If people see that you’re often reading from notes they will assume that you are not an expert in that field, or that you didn’t care enough about the presentation to memorize your material. You want to avoid that. Make sure you glance at your notes when a break occurs, i.e. when showing a video.

You should never, under no circumstances, read big chunks of your presentation from notes or, even worse, from the slides themselves. The world doesn’t need another boring presentation.
