I felt the point was spot on, which is that if you are going to use profanity in your presentation it is useful to 'think twice' which I read as, "Sit back and think about what you are trying to achieve by doing that." The OP gave some examples of reasons people might come up with; waking up the audience, setting the tone, Etc. In general there is a lot of difference between folks who do spend a bit of time thinking about their presentation and those who basically spin one off on the fly.
So if you're using profanity, and you think about why you chose to use profanity, and you agree with that choice then by all means go with it. However if you find that you're trying to bracket some key message that you really want your audience to go home with, then perhaps swearing isn't necessary. It can also be a lot less effective than you think.
Saying "Social media is so over" can be more effective at getting attention than "What the fuck is Social Media?" if the audience is invested in social media and have been defending it, as a concept/meme/market, with skeptical acquaintences.
I think one of the reasons that the author misses is that, as used by Zach Holman, 'fuck' levels the field between presenter and audience. "I'm not so important that I can't swear." It can be arrogant or overly formal to embrace how "gorgeous" your slides are, to emphasize how "gifted" you are at presenting. Instead, it emphasizes the fuckhead in all of us; the flaws, in order to say unequivocally "Yeah I'm an asshole sometimes, but here's what I think and I think it's worth hearing: I hope you do too."
Ok, I can see that, but I've seen folks who have tried and failed to make the audience think, that they themselves (the presenter) thought, of themselves (the presenter) as just another voice in the crowd.
In general if one is presenting and choosing to change one's vocabulary and speech habits in order to be less off putting to the audience, one risks coming off as insincere and condescending. Just like prose in the third person singular sounds presumptuous :-)
Presenting _is_ choosing to change one's vocabulary and speech habits, in order to bond with the audience. It's a matter of how good one is that determines whether a "fuck" is a fuck-up or a fuck-yes.
[eww, that parallelism felt forced, but I can't resist.]
I felt the point was spot on, which is that if you are going to use profanity in your presentation it is useful to 'think twice' which I read as, "Sit back and think about what you are trying to achieve by doing that." The OP gave some examples of reasons people might come up with; waking up the audience, setting the tone, Etc. In general there is a lot of difference between folks who do spend a bit of time thinking about their presentation and those who basically spin one off on the fly.
So if you're using profanity, and you think about why you chose to use profanity, and you agree with that choice then by all means go with it. However if you find that you're trying to bracket some key message that you really want your audience to go home with, then perhaps swearing isn't necessary. It can also be a lot less effective than you think.
Saying "Social media is so over" can be more effective at getting attention than "What the fuck is Social Media?" if the audience is invested in social media and have been defending it, as a concept/meme/market, with skeptical acquaintences.