Some tips for presentations that I try to remember to incorporate (but don't always succeed at):
Get the audience's attention.
If you can involve some kind of emotional aspect, it will be more attention grabbing & memorable. Fear works well. For instance, put the audience in a narrative where some critical decision has to be made or something terrible might happen. Sex appeal also works well, although you might have to be discrete about how you go about utilizing it. Even something like pictures of delicious food might be enough to get people focused.
Make your point clear & succinct.
Some people like to make their point at the beginning; some at the end. The more times something is repeated, the more likely it is to be remembered. Consider putting it in both places.
Make your presentations interactive.
Narrative is one way to get the audience's brain working, but you could also ask questions, for example. Attention spans can be extremely short, even for highly intelligent people. Some sources say you need to re-hook your audience every 10 minutes or so, so you might want to design "hooks" (emotional, interactive, or better yet both) into your presentations.
Don't expect your audience to remember everything.
Human memories are terrible. A week after hearing a lecture, the average person will forget 90% of the material covered. Try to make your main points the 10% that stick. If you are doing a lecture series, you could even reinforce the main points of previous lectures by going over them very quickly as a review before the next lecture begins.
Markdown syntax tip: If a list item has multiple paragraphs, the second and subsequent paragraphs of that list item must be indented by four spaces.
Just recently at my high school, a group of classmates and I started a science club. A major component of this is listening and giving peer lectures on topics of physics, math, computer science, etc. I picked a topic a bit off to the side: philosophy and decision making. Naturally, this includes rationality. My plan is to start with something based off the sequences, specifically "How to Actually Change Your Mind" and "A Human's Guide to Words".
I was hoping the Less Wrong community could give me some suggestions, tips, or even alternative ways to approach this. There is no end goal, we just want to learn more and think better. All our members are among the top 5% academically of their own grade. Most of us are seniors and have finished high school math, taking AP Calculus this year. We have covered basic statistics and Bayes' Theorem, but only applied it to the Disease Problem.
Any help or ideas are appreciated.
Update: Thank you for all these suggestions! They are incredibly helpful for me. I will attempt to make a recording of the lecture period if possible. I will make another discussion post sometime next weekend (the first lecture is next Friday) to report how it went.
Update 2: Report here.