Blog posts on Content
Webinar “How to Plan an Audience-friendly Presentation”: Your Questions Answered
Last week I delivered a webinar "How to plan an Audience-friendly Presentation" as part of Ellen Finkelstein's Outstanding Presentations Workshop. The message of my presentation was "To create an audience-friendly presentation, use a planner" (pictured right). Heaps...
The Seven Types of Presentation to Avoid
Have you inflicted one of these types of presentation on your audience? These seven types are all a result of a lack of planning or the wrong sort of planning. I’ll be looking at how to avoid some of these presentation planning traps in a live webinar with Ellen...
Presentation structure: Why it’s smarter to put your conclusion in your opening
A long time ago I attended a presentation on ostrich farming. It was pleasantly interesting because I love animals but I didn’t really get the point – after all I wasn’t planning on being an ostrich farmer. At the end of the presentation the presenter said “And that’s...
How to write a presentation title that gets people flocking to your session
You might not give much thought to your presentation title for a conference presentation. The conference organizers will have asked you to provide a title and an abstract for the conference programme and you manage to slap something together just before the deadline....
How to simplify your presentation without dumbing it down
Making a presentation simple requires hard thinking. You might be concerned that in your quest to make your presentation simple, you'll dumb it down. In this post I want to show you the difference between dumbing down and true simplicity - and how you can achieve true...
How to stop information overload in your presentation
Do your presentations suffer from information overload? One of my readers, Alec, wrote to me for help with this: I know I should edit mercilessly, but the dilemma is that I'm often presenting fairly controversial points of view, or unorthodox (but proven) approaches,...
7 ways to keep audience attention during your presentation
Keeping audience attention is more important and more difficult than grabbing audience attention. A reader emailed me: “What can I do to keep the audience’s attention through the whole of my presentation. There are always people who don’t seem to be listening.” A...
How to craft a memorable key message in 10 minutes
A key message is the number one thing you want your audience to remember or do as a result of your presentation. Some experts call it “the big idea”, the core of your presentation or the proposition. Start planning your presentation by deciding on your key message. It...
Why your presentation shouldn’t flow
When I ask people on our courses how their presentation went they often say "It didn't flow." I ask them to elaborate and they say "I stumbled, I had mind blanks, and I had to start sentences again because they didn't make sense." I then ask the audience how they...
How to create soundbites in your presentation
Max Atkinson claims there's no magic to it. There's no need to go to a quote book. Follow rhetorical principles and you can create your own quotable soundbite. Twenty-five years ago Max Atkinson was an Oxford academic - his area of research was conversation analysis....
