From the category archives:

Content

Presentation structure: Why it’s smarter to put your conclusion in your opening

June 21, 2010

A long time ago I attended a presentation on ostrich farming. It was pleasantly interesting because I love animals but I didn’t really get the point – after all I wasn’t planning on being an ostrich farmer. At the end of the presentation the presenter said “And that’s why you should invest in ostrich [...]

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How to write a presentation title that gets people flocking to your session

May 25, 2010

You might not give much thought to your presentation title for a conference presentation. The conference organizers will have asked you to provide a title and an abstract for the conference programme and you manage to slap something together just before the deadline.
But your presentation title can determine whether you have a smattering of people [...]

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How to simplify your presentation without dumbing it down

May 2, 2010

Making a presentation simple requires hard thinking. You might be concerned that in your quest to make your presentation simple, you’ll dumb it down. In this post I want to show you the difference between dumbing down and true simplicity – and how you can achieve true simplicity in your presentation.
What is simplicity
Here’s my favorite [...]

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How to stop information overload in your presentation

April 19, 2010

Do your presentations suffer from information overload? One of my readers, Alec, wrote to me for help with this:
I know I should edit mercilessly, but the dilemma is that I’m often presenting fairly controversial points of view, or unorthodox (but proven) approaches, and so I know what all the objections or questions will be, and [...]

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7 ways to keep audience attention during your presentation

November 18, 2009

Keeping audience attention is more important and more difficult than grabbing audience attention. A reader emailed me:
“What can I do to keep the audience’s attention through the whole of my presentation. There are always people who don’t seem to be listening.”
A one-way presentation is one of the worst possible ways of transferring information from person [...]

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How to craft a memorable key message in 10 minutes

November 11, 2009

A key message is the number one thing you want your audience to remember or do as a result of your presentation. Some experts call it “the big idea”, the core of your presentation or the proposition.
Start planning your presentation by deciding on your key message. It will make the rest of your planning [...]

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Why your presentation shouldn’t flow

September 8, 2009

When I ask people on our courses how their presentation went they often say “It didn’t flow.” I ask them to elaborate and they say “I stumbled, I had mind blanks, and I had to start sentences again because they didn’t make sense.”
I then ask the audience how they found the presentation – they often [...]

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How to create soundbites in your presentation

September 4, 2009

Max Atkinson claims there’s no magic to it. There’s no need to go to a quote book. Follow rhetorical principles and you can create your own quotable soundbite.
Twenty-five years ago Max Atkinson was an Oxford academic – his area of research was conversation analysis. Then he coached Anne Brennan, a woman with no speaking experience [...]

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When can you break the “rule” of a three-part structure?

August 7, 2009

In my Presentation Planning Guide I suggest that you use a thee-part structure for your presentation. They work for novels and movies, and for presentations too.
But, using a three-part structure is not a rule set in concrete. Sometimes your presentation will be more effective with more points. There’s a risk though, that each time you [...]

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How to create a “new” presentation from pre-existing slides

June 13, 2009

In a perfect world, every new presentation would be prepared from scratch, tailored exactly to the specific audience. But in reality, you sometimes have to cobble together a “new presentation” from pre-existing material.
How can you create an effective presentation in the shortest possible time using pre-existing slides from different sources?
There are two phases to this. [...]