Book Review: Persuasive Presentations

Nancy Duarte is a communications expert. She teaches others how to make presentations that will move and change people. Her book is called Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences. She wrote another book called Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. This book distills her wisdom from the previous books and puts it all into one book called Persuasive Presentations.

Nancy suggests that we plan our presentation in three stages – Conceiving, Visualizing and Presenting.Conceiving: Know your audience ahead of time and build empathy. For instance, if you are presenting to senior executives, she suggests that you present the summary findings upfront. They often lack patience to listen to someone drone on with details. Then craft the presentation like a story by using storytelling principles and structure to engage the audience. Then identify the best media to use.Visualizing: We use slides to display information. Remember, the slides are for the audience – not a teleprompter for the presenter. Nancy says that your slides must be understood in 3 seconds. People read at 250 words per minute. So the lesser the words on the slide, the more likely the audience will listen to you instead of reading long paragraphs on the slide.Presenting: This really is the reason you prepared the slides in the first place. Many things come in the way. People get nervous. Quiet your mind to stop the self-critical internal chatter, breathe, laugh a little and remember it is only a presentation (the last one is what I tell myself). She has a neat blog post on being a remote presenter. The book has tips on this as well. I loved this blog post she has with three different presenters – no, one of them is not Steve Jobs.I am off to Jaipur for the second year in a row to run a workshop on Storytelling to coincide with the Jaipur Literature Festival. The idea is simple – give people an idea to observe world-class storytellers and see the power stories have. This year I plan to give each participant a copy of this book Persuasive Presentations by Nancy Duarte.The section I loved the most was on the different kinds of slides you can create for different outcomes. How many of these do you use: Walk-in slide, Title slide, Navigation slide, Bullet slide, Big Word slide, Quote slide, Data slide, Diagram slide, Conceptual Image slide, Video slide, Walk-out slide.Overall: I recommend this book if you are in a role where you need to present ideas. That would mean not just executives but also students. In fact, I wish I had read this book when I started my career. I would have made more persuasive presentations for sure.-----------------------First appeared on the Times of India Blog on 13 Jan 2013