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How to present like Michael Wesch

March 20, 2009

Michael Wesch studies YouTube the way David Attenborough studies insects and lizards. Along the way he’s developed a superbly engaging presentation style. I don’t often watch presentation videos to the end – but I was glued to the screen for the entire 55 minutes of this presentation: What is the Michael Wesch style? It’s a [...]

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4 reasons to spend time on planning your presentation

March 12, 2009

Devoting time to preparing a presentation is worth it. Here are four reasons: 1. The audience’s time Balance the time that you will spend planning the presentation against the time of the people in your audience. Say you’re presenting to 10 people for 40 minutes. That’s 400 minutes of people’s time – 6.6 hours. Isn’t [...]

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8 Presentation Tips for beating Audience Boredom

March 4, 2009

I asked you, my readers, to tell me about the challenges you have with presenting on “boring” topics. Ann Hemplemann wrote to me: Oh, Olivia, you are ringing my bell on this one! I’m an environmental engineer and educator, and my topics range from dull to confusing. I give presentations designed to help plant operations [...]

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How to make a boring presentation interesting #1

February 18, 2009

In my post Do you have to give boring presentations? I asked you to tell me about the boring presentations you have to give. The pain and frustration you suffer from having to give boring presentations poured into my e-mail inbox and the comments section of that post. In this post, I look at the issues [...]

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Do you have to give boring presentations?

February 8, 2009

My next post is going to be on “How to make a boring presentation interesting”. I’d like to make the post as relevant as possible to the problems you face giving presentations. So if you have to give a presentation that you think could be more interesting, I’d love to know: the topic of the [...]

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9 ways to edit your presentation

January 28, 2009

I ask people who download my presentation planning guide what they find hardest about presenting. Here are some of the answers: Being concise Finishing on time Fitting everything into the allotted time Finding a balance between presenting too much and too little Not giving too much info. It’s a common problem. Most of us have [...]

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The three key ingredients for planning a presentation

December 24, 2008

The Speak Fearlessly blog has just published a guest post I’ve written on the three key ingredients for planning a presentation. You can check it out at Presentation Planning Guide: The Three Key Ingredients.

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How to tell a story like Malcolm Gladwell

December 20, 2008

I bought Outliers two days ago. And though I’m familiar with many of the stories that Gladwell tells I’m still entranced. They work on the printed page and they’ll also work for you in a presentation. How does he do it? Here’s my analysis of Gladwell’s storytelling techniques - illustrated by Chapter Five of the [...]

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New scientific research on memory

December 16, 2008

I love having scientific back-up for the way we do things as presenters. So I subscribe to a number of cognitive science blogs to keep up-to-date. Here are two research studies on memory. The first one backs up what we already know – we’ve got a great memory for visual detail. And the second has [...]

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How to save time preparing a presentation

December 12, 2008

Many of the people who come on our courses say that it takes them ages to prepare a presentation. Then we teach them our presentation planning system and they say: “It enabled me to put together an effective presentation ready to present to senior management in half-a-day. Normally this would have taken me two weeks.” [...]