Anticipating resistance forces you to really think about the people you’re presenting to, and that makes it easier to influence them. If you’ve made a sincere effort to look at the world through their eyes

"Nobody is as interested in you as you think they are,"

slides ever created, see "8 PowerPoint Train Wrecks.")

Practice 10 hours for every one hour of the presentation (

"You don't need an expert coach to be there to find these things," Gallo says. "You'll pick out one hundred things on your own that are annoying or maybe are some bad habits that you never knew you did."

Just because the software lets you

learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they’re stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds.

You’ll reinforce your message and make it easier for people to get what you’re saying. Here’s an “after” slide to illustrate:

But there’s beauty and clarity in restraint.

If they fall below 24 pt then you might be on to something.

Replace bullet points with images

To do that she must engage their emotions,” McKee says, “and the key to their hearts is story.”

The biggest element a story has, then, is conflict. Conflict is dramatic.

ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

participatory storytelling that combines the use of hand-drawn visuals with the engaging narration of a live presenter.

crystallize the essence

The Curse of Knowledge is essentially the condition whereby the deliverer of the message cannot imagine what it’s like not to possess his level of background knowledge on the topic. When he speaks in abstractions to the audience, it makes perfect sense to him but him alone. In his mind, it seems simple and obvious.

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.)

That is, it is more effective to target both the visual and auditory processors of working memory.

o cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images. No dissolves, spins or other transitions. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

And it’s long past time that we realized that putting the same information on a slide that is coming out of our mouths usually does not help — in fact usually hurts our message.

Put it in terms people can visualize.

Why is it, though, that when the majority of smart, talented, story-loving people have the chance to present, they usually resort to generating streams of vaguely connected information rather than stories or examples and illustrations?