Two hours is quite a long talk. To keep audience’s attention, I suggest that you introduce dialogues intermittently in your talk. At certain points of your presentation, before you introduce your story about something - do take time to find out the relevant ideas from the audience e.g. their assumptions, views, fears or perhaps things they have done so far to reduce their cholesterol levels. That’ll help the audience to warm up to you and that helps keep their interests (as they probably want to find out more from you).

I also find that students’ attention starts to wane after 30 mins or so into my lecture. Thus, I usually end my lecture earlier than the allocated lecture time. So, perhaps you could break your presentation into two parts, request from the organiser some sort of refreshments. You could use the tea break to mingle and find out from the audience their views about your talk and what they’d probably want to know more. Then, you could change a bit of your story accordingly to accommodate these comments/views. In a sense, giving a presentation is similar to jazz - play it by ear. That’ll make your presentation effective & memorable:-)

For more about keeping your audience engaged, search Garr’s PZ gold mine for story or storytelling. Here’s one link about ‘talking with them’: http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2005/12/talkingatthem.html. All the best:-)!!

Out of order responses to your questions:

2) Beyond Bullet Points is such a great resource for encouraging structure, but if the “parallel” structure of headlines on each slide feels wrong to you and you’ve thought hard about whether the audience will be able to follow your overall flow without them, then I hereby pronounce you free to go without them. Consider Lawrence Lessig’s awesome presentations: tons of structure, no headlines.

1 & 3) I loved your line about your mind not working in groups of three - it’s a jumping off point for me to suggest that the way you keep people engaged and the way you organize your talk are the same thing. There’s a reason you’re the one giving the talk - something about cholesterol gets you going enough that you’ve become an expert. What is it? Why is the subject meaningful to you? At the same time, as you point out, there’s something there that’s meaningful for the audience. Where do those two things overlap? If you start by looking for the common points between what you care about and what your audience cares about, you should find the structure flowing from that.

Great analogy to jazz - that’s a really important idea. The structure of the presentation is just the underpinning, not the whole point.

I find BBP really useful early in the process, but — with respect to a great book — if you followed it to the letter through slide creation for every presentation you made, it would get samey fast.

This is covering stuff you already know, but remember that you want to make an emotional connection, so concentrate on what the data means to people (even academicians). Telling some kind of story is critical. (That’s where the BBP clarification is terrific).

Also, as Garr suggests, try to put as much of the charts and data in a leave-behind document, presenting only the bits that are essential to the story you want to tell.

Not sure these ideas are helpful for the sort of presentation you have to make but I really believe there are ways to make any presentation more interesting just by remembering that everyone there wants to at least contemplate how their life should be different based on what you have to say.