by Matthew on June 2, 2011
It’s common for people to complain about the writing we all see in business. People like to bemoan the rambling e-mails, the sloppy grammar, and wonder what will become of the English language now that texting is the most common form of written communication.
It’s easy as well to catalog the errors people make in business correspondence. In the workshops I teach I focus on the most common errors: poor organization, too much data, and not taking readers into account.
But it has occurred to me recently that there may be a simpler problem with business writing, which is that everyone is writing “working documents” instead of seeing the writing process through to a final document. And it’s not just that people don’t have or don’t take the time to write a final version of their communications. My sense is that people only write working documents because they don’t know what a final document should look like.
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by Matthew on April 8, 2011
I just found out last week that Nancy Duarte came out with a new book last year called Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences. Nancy’s first book, Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations, was a handsomely illustrated guide to graphic design as the road to great presentations. But “come to find out,” Nancy writes in the Introduction to Resonate, “there was a much deeper problem” than poor graphic design. “Gussying up slides that have meaningless content is like putting lipstick on a pig.”
Nancy’s solution to the messaging problem in presentations is storytelling. “The methodology in Resonate,” she explains, “uses story frameworks to create presentations that will engage, transform, and activate audiences. After more than twenty years of developing presentations for the best brands and thought leaders in the world, we’ve codified our Visual Story™ methodology so you can change your world!”
Resonate delivers on Nancy’s promise. Resonate is the most insightful and practical book available on how to use storytelling in a business context. But, although I appreciate Nancy’s quest for an approach that will help people deliver better presentations, I have one reservation. Storytelling is actually the problem with many presentations.
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by Matthew on March 31, 2011
One of the most common mistakes people make when preparing presentations is diving right into their slideware. They don’t plan what they are going to say before they start creating slides. Too often, the result is a poorly organized talk with too many slides that bores the audience.
Most people start preparing presentations by creating slides because they think they don’t have time to plan. After all, they have slides to prepare! There is a little trick in PowerPoint, however, that enables you to create an entire slide deck directly from an outline created in Word. Which means you don’t have to choose between creating slides and planning your talk.
There are several pitfalls to preparing a presentation by starting with your slides. First, slideware is better suited to preparing visual aids than it is to crafting a message.
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by Matthew on March 24, 2011
Books and training on graphic design and presentation skills have become the rage in recent years as sources for solutions to bad PowerPoint presentations. But what can be missed in this focus on design and delivery skills is that a clear message is the prerequisite for their effective use.
When preparing presentations, we tend to make the same mistake we make when writing e-mails and documents—we fail to plan what we are going to say. We dive right in to creating slides. Too often, the result is a poorly organized presentation, with too many slides, that bores the audience.
Therefore, the first step in preparing a presentation is to identify our message—what we want our audience to do or believe as a result of our talk. Defining our message first, in this way, will enable us to determine exactly what information we will include in our presentation—just enough to support what we are going to say.
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by Matthew on March 1, 2011
A few weeks ago, a number of sites were promoting Just Say No to PowerPoint Week.
Great idea. The problem was no one seemed to know what to do instead.
Fast Company mentioned that the Demo and Finovate tech conferences have banned presentations and replaced them with 7-minute product demos—substituting one technology for another. The idea, apparently, is that the product will talk instead of the slideshow.
After bringing up the usual debate about whether the fault lies with PowerPoint or with the presenter, TheJobBored suggested that what we really need is a Learn to Give Better Presentations Week. How about we work on that one?
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