Notes on How I Made My Presentations a Little Better

This article is written by Merlin Mann on the 23rd of August 2007. The name of this article is How I made my presentations a little better. In this article, Mann talks about how he still has a long way to go and none of his suggestions are professional and that he has learned from a lot of experts. Later on, he explains that if you have trouble with your visuals, it might be good for you to use Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule, which is a rule that says a PowerPoint presentation should only have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. IStockPhoto is a search engine where you can find inexpensive images to licence for presentations. Their search engine gets interesting images and is good. Some of the things that you have to do in order to give a nice presentation include clearing your throat as little as possible when you start. You must try to open the presentation with something that connects with your audience or something to do with the real world. An image or an anecdote would be a good start- something to capture the audience’s attention. Another thing is that try to have as less as possible words on your slides. Try to use big fonts and make the information on each slide as simple as possible. You should also consider showing images and text that make an orthogonal point to what you are saying aloud to the audience at that moment. Allow the audience to understand it without you helping them. Another thing you should always do is finish early. If you finish late, what that shows is that you did not spend time preparing yourself to give the speech in this amount of time. The audience might also get bored if you just keep on going. The most important reason to finish early is so that you have enough time to take any questions. You should always help audience with anything they don’t understand.