Presentation Patterns: Techniques for Crafting Better Presentations uses an innovative format to illuminate the elements shared by strong presentations and the habits shared by strong presenters.
The authors — Neal Ford, Matthew McCullough, and Nathaniel Schutta — are highly experienced conference presenters with a knack for exposing the truth in presentations around us.
This article is one of a series of public speaking book reviews from Six Minutes.
For decades, popular opinion pegged Bill Gates as a mediocre presenter.
That all changed on February 5, 2009, when he unleashed one of the most memorable props ever on his audience: live mosquitos.
In this article, we discuss:
When I was in high school, every teacher used an overhead projector regularly. Many years later, I can’t recall the last time I saw one used as meeting rooms are increasing equipped with digital projectors to display PowerPoint and Keynote slides. This is a clear technology upgrade, and I don’t miss the overhead projector at all.
Similarly, the flip chart is another device my teachers used often; sadly, it also gathers dust often in dark, neglected corners of meeting rooms. But flip charts are more than just relics; they remain one of the most versatile tools readily available to speakers.
In this article, we list the core benefits of using flip charts, and give several tips that will help you use this wonderful tool effectively.
Crafting a presentation is hard work, and as a presenter, you must make many tough decisions. How long should you present? How many slides should you create? How should you organize the speech?
What if there was a template you could use to help you with all of these decisions? There is such a template, and it is growing in popularity. Read on to find out more about Ignite!
Full-day training courses offer many challenges for speakers, including:
If you can overcome these challenges, you can provide significant value for your audience.
This past week, I was fortunate to attend a series of full-day training courses (Usability Week 2012 in San Francisco, offered by the Nielsen Norman Group). While my focus was building my usability knowledge, it was also a great opportunity to learn from people who speak regularly around the world. One of these speakers was Marieke McCloskey, who taught my first session of the week.
This article offers 28 tips for designing and presenting training courses inspired by Marieke’s strengths and areas for improvement.
Presenters, teachers, and students all resist design-centered slide design on the basis of a perceived lack of time. Since I know that the visually-driven, Zen approach works, I am not deterred by this resistance; instead, I use one simple phrase to help cultivate strong design from presenters whose time is limited.
If you want to create beautiful, impactful, and audience-centered slides but don’t have 20 hours or more to devote to designing a slide deck, just remember the acronym C-R-A-P *, and create slides that embody strong Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.
Yesterday, Alex Rister introduced five habits that college students need to purge.
In this article, she continues with five more negative habits.
College students come into my classroom not only with a flurry of fears and insecurities, but also with baggage in the form of bad presentation habits they have developed over the years.
My students’ bad habits didn’t happen overnight. These habits develop through years and years of watching terrible presentations. While most of us can recognize a terrible presentation, we don’t yet have the tools to make our own presentations great.
In a class called Professional Communication and Presentation, I teach my students how to break their bad habits. These lessons apply to all presenters: teachers, conference presenters, business executives… anyone who has a speech to deliver. Read on to see how you can un-learn these habits, too!
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures is a wonderful book packed with insights for translating ideas into visuals. It’s not a surprise to me that this book was listed in the Top 10 Business Books list for 2008.
Being a great speaker requires more than simply adopting the “more visuals, less bullet points” approach. You need to have effective visuals. The Back of the Napkin helps you figure out how by boosting your visual thinking skills.
This article is the latest of a series of public speaking book reviews here on Six Minutes.
Universal Principles of Design is a valuable resource for anyone who designs anything, including speeches and presentations
This article is the latest of a series of public speaking book reviews here on Six Minutes.
Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, and Cliff Atkinson are the authors of three hugely popular books on presentation design in the last five years.
What else do all three have in common? They all point to Richard E Mayer’s Multimedia Learning as recommended reading for presentation design.
And I agree.
This article is the latest of a series of public speaking book reviews here on Six Minutes.
| Subscribe via Email |  |
| Subscribe via RSS |  |
| Follow Six Minutes |
|
Six Minutes Copyright © 2007-2019 All Rights Reserved.
Read our permissions policy, privacy policy, or disclosure policy.
Comments? Questions? Contact us.
