Download PDF Better PowerPoint® Quick Fixes Based on How Your Audience Thinks By STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN

Sinopsis

Presentations: We´ve all sat through them, wondering why we´re there; or we´ve given them, wondering whether the audience cares. This is a book about how to make presentations effective and therefore more interesting to the audience members.

Years ago, I was at a conference where one of the most distinguished cognitive scientists in the world, an expert in how the mind processes information, was wandering though a PowerPoint® presentation and losing the audience in the process. I thought about the number of presentations I had heard where the presenters did not accommodate their audience members´ short attention spans, difficulty reading small type, need for organization, and other strengths and weaknesses. As a scientist, I started thinking about how to use well-known laboratory findings to improve presentations.

And then I wrote a book.

My book Clear and to the Point addressed all aspects of presentations and discussed eight ``rules´´ about how our minds work: the same eight rules discussed in this guide. In that book, I assumed that the reader was starting from scratch and would read the book cover to cover. Although generally well received, it soon became clear to me that there is still a need for another, more focused book—for at least two reasons: First, most people interested in PowerPoint® presentations have already made at least one presentation; they are not PowerPoint® innocents. Second, people who want a book on presentations want one that they can use easily, not one they can take to an evening chair and read cover to cover.

With these considerations in mind, this book distills the core of my earlier book into a quick guide on how you can revise a presentation you already have in hand. I have also added new material, partly in response to feedback

I received regarding the earlier book. This book is organized so that you can easily revise your presentation in a couple of hours, using checklists at the start of each chapter to help you improve your work. Does the world really need yet another book on electronic slideshow presentations? Since my previous effort, a number of superb books on this topic have been published. Garr Reynold´s Presentation Zen and Nancy Duarte´s slide:ology immediately spring to mind as outstanding contributions. The available books, however, assume that readers are starting from scratch, much as I did, and also assume that readers have plenty of time to perfect their work. In fact, it´s easy to defend the recommendation that you should spend 30 to 90 hours to prepare a slideshow and craft your presentation. But I have long lived with the realities of being on the road, with having to prepare and revise presentations on the fly. In my experience, we keep having ideas about how to tune our presentations right up to the point where we have to deliver them. Moreover, most of us don´t have art departments to assemble slides for us, as some of the other books sometimes seem to assume. This book is written as a practical guide for today´s road warrior who needs to tune up an existing presentation, and do so quickly.

I have many people to thank for inspiring and helping me make this book a reality. First, Laurence Alexander suggested that I write this book, and provided useful advice at every turn. Second, Catharine Carlin of Oxford University Press once again proved invaluable (this is the fourth book I have done with her); Catharine once again saved me from myself. Third, Alexandra Russell and Jennifer Shephard gave me useful feedback on an earlier draft (and Alex, Jennifer, and Rogier Kievit collaborated in the studies that I summarize briefly in Chapter 1 and in the Epilogue, which are reported in Kosslyn, S. M., Kievit, R. A., Russell, A. G., and Shephard, J. M. [2009], PowerPoint® presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis. Submitted for publication). Dan Willingham provided valuable advice about how to present this material, which was much appreciated. Fourth, my agent Rafe Sagalyn once again proved to be a creative problem solver. Next, I need to thank everyone who contributed to Clear and to the Point (noted in the preface to that book)—I built on their wisdom, and have

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