Made to stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (find it here, affiliate link) is recommended reading for everyone who delivers presentations: it analyzes why certain stories "stick" in people's mind, and why others disappear, almost independent of the content: it's they way that they are told that matters.
- Keep them simple without creating silly sound bites
- Add unexpected twists to keep people interested
- Be specific and avoid fluffy hollow statements (Dilbert mission generator style)
- Be credible to get people to believe your idea
- Add emotion to make people care
- Tell stories
- The brain stores stories in a "virtual 3D" space. Slightly absurd experiment: people read a sentence about a guy and a shirt slower when the shirt has just been taken off a few seconds ago. Your presentation structure and the structure used to absorb information is not the same
- Being analytical, logical, thinking of numbers switches off your emotional mood: the mood in which you are most receptive to store information. Think about that when ordering slides
- The curse of knowledge (actually this is a big idea in the book) prevents people from putting themselves in the shoes of an audience for which a concept that took you 3 years to understand might not sound as obvious as it seems to you
- Another example of the curse of knowledge: when someone taps a song with his fingers on a table, he/she hears the entire performance including vocals, instruments, etc. A bystander just hears an irregular beat of taps...
- 70% of learning can happen by just imagining, anticipating, thinking about the task ahead of you (scientifically proven): rehearse, rehearse, rehearse your presentation.
- Negative "don't", "avoid this", "don't fall in this trap"-type recommendations stick better than positive ones: people learn from mistakes. This goes a bit against my marketing theory in business school though.
SlideMagic: a platform for magical presentations. Free student plan available.