atw: More on presentations

I'd like to start a bit of a "crusade" at work against what I see as some _awful_ presentations. I'm frequently _shocked_ by how many words get crammed onto some slides -- sometimes literally hundreds!

One of my opening shots in the crusade will be to get people to time how long it takes to read such a slide, and then ask presenters if they remain silent for that long to let their audience actually read what's on the screen!

Someone from the list recommended the book Presenting to Win by Jerry Weissman. (It looks very good, so thank you for that tip.) There are 3 sample chapters at:
http://vig.prenhall.com/samplechapter/0130464139.pdf
http://www.phptr.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=444467
http://www.phptr.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=31836

Like Beyond Bullet Points, Weissman's book emphasises the need to have a good "story" -- a way to appeal to your audience and keep their interest. And you can't tell a good story using bullet points!

Other aspects of Presenting to Win :
• Highly audience-focused approach.
• Suggests brainstorming when you start developing a presentation, which also purges all the details that should NOT end up on your slides!
• Start with the (audience's) objective in mind.

(A word of caution - I found several other books by Weissman, but chapter-sized chunks of text seem to have been pasted between them, so I'd be careful about buying more than 1 of his books on the same subject!)

In any presentation, absurd information overload is what Weissman calls a "data dump". I'm sure such overload has to be dropped to make a "good" presentation, but I do wonder how much information the medium can convey effectively, and I suspect that it really can't convey much. I can't help feeling that the similarity with TV is striking, and certainly TV doesn't tend to be very information-rich, pretty much through necessity I believe.

With a couple of notable exceptions, what's the most words you've ever seen on a TV screen? Certainly nowhere near hundreds! (The exceptions are things like the words disappearing into space at the start of Star Wars, and the credits at the end of most shows, but in neither case are you expected both to read and to listen at the same time!) During the news they sometimes have a couple of bullet points on the screen (for things like summarising taxation changes) or the words of a quote, but it tends to be only a handful of words, and it's used sparingly.

Maybe the strength of both TV and presentations lies in connecting with a person (think of TV's ability to do close-ups), yet presentations are typically almost completely devoid of emotion at present. It could be that we're frequently using the wrong medium -- presentations -- to present information!

What say you?
Craig
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