Here’s a quick way to make over a bullet-point slide

It’s called the Assertion-Evidence Format and it was developed by Professor Michael Alley (I’ve mentioned it previously but somehow never devoted a whole post to it).

BTW, if you’ve downloaded and read my Presentation Planning Guide, you’ll see that this slide format dovetails nicely with the planning system I describe in the Guide.

First let’s look at the Assertion part of the format. [Read more]

Six lessons in public speaking from Obama

America has elected the greatest political speaker for a generation.

You may think that there’s nothing for you to learn from Barack Obama’s speechmaking skills – that speaking to 200,000 people at Grant Park, Chicago is too far removed from the presentation you might give to your staff, to your management team or to potential clients. Here are six lessons you can learn from Obama’s acceptance speech at Grant Park.

1. Know your audience

It would have been easy for Obama to fall into the trap of talking to the 200,000 people before him in Grant Park. He didn’t. He spoke to Americans in their living rooms, he spoke to those who voted for McCain, he spoke to people watching him across the world – leaders and the poorest of the  poor. He knew who his audience was. [Read more]

The Top 10 PowerPoint slides from Slideshare

Slidesharing sites like Slideshare and Slideboom are a great place to get inspiration on PowerPoint slide design. You can see different ideas and adapt them for your own presentations. Slideshare is currently running the World’s Best Presentation Contest (see footnote) which has some great examples of PowerPoint slide design. To save you time I’ve picked two sample slides from the 5 most popular entries. They’ll offer you inspiration for the design of your own slides.

(To see the whole slideshow click on the link I’ve provided for each set of slides).

1. Play with text

[Read more]

Make your pictures concrete too

The more concrete and specific you make your words, the more persuasive you will be to your audience. The same applies to the pictures you show. Recent research backs this up. Students were given short fictional news stories to read:

One story claimed that watching TV was linked to maths ability, based on the fact that both TV viewing and maths activate the temporal love [of the brain]. Crucially students rated these stories to be more scientifically sound when they were accompanied by a brain image, compared with when the equivalent data were presented in a bar chart, or when there was no graphical illustration at all.

[Read more]