** My Intellectual Flakes **

I have become quite interested in presentation skills lately probably due to lot of bad presentations I have to put up with during conferences. For many (including me) PPT is just copying and pasting words from papers to slides which can be accomplished in at most half a day. To improve my presentation skill, I picked up “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds.

Based on the ideas of Daniel Pink in “A whole new mind“, a good presenter should have the following six aptitudes:

Presentation is definitely NOT reading what’s on the slides. Presentation is the transfer of meaning and emotion. It’s about making others to adopt your views. In this light, presenters are like sales persons. Creation of a presentation is drastically different from crafting a paper. A presentation resembles story-telling in many levels.

Preparation Stage

THE most important part of the presentation is the MESSAGE you want to deliver. Thus the central questions are: What is your point? Why does it matter? Besides, other factors to be taken into consideration include time, venue, audience, purpose of the talk. Avoid slideument. Slides are NOT documents or handouts.

Crafting the story

Six principles to make sticky messages -SUCCEs (From book Made to Stick):

• Simplicity
• Unexpectedness: surprise people (show the gap in their knowledge), stimulate their curiosity
• Concreteness: not abstractions.
• Credibility: put cold numbers in terms people can easily visualize
• Emotions: Use images to arouse emotions
• Stories: we love stories

Storyboarding is helpful to craft the flow and feel of presentation. This can be achieved by slide sorter view in PPT or light table view in Keynote. Here is the steps to follow to create storyboard:

1. Brainstorming ideas for each slide (flow of messages), don’t worry about images.
2. Grouping and identifying the core /main theme, that message audience will take away
3. storyboarding off the computer