Well done me. It’s done. Well, it isn’t of course, ‘cos there’s all the re-wriing and so on, but the first drafts of all the substantive chapters are complete… and now some of them are out for feedback with some volunteers. I’ve only sent a few chapters out to quite a lot of people: my thinking is that by comparing all the feedback from different people on a few chapters I’ll be able to compare all the different thoughts and see if there’s an overview or consensus. (Not sure what I’ll do if there isn’t!) Then I can see if there’s stuff i can take from that feedback and apply it to the other chapters.
One of the questions I’ve been asked a few times in the writing process is how I chose the chapters. Well….. it’s been a bit of a heuristic process but the principles I’ve used to guide my thinking are these:
- Is the topic one that is important to presenters, judging from my experience and/or the number of times I’ve been asked by clients to help them with it. That’s the be-all-and-end-all… .sure there were other things I picked up on but this was the ultimate filter. If it didn’t pass this test, it was out. (Which in some ways was a shame ‘cos there were some fascinating potential chapters that got researched by not drafted. Maybe I’ll write them up in this blog :) )
- Is their solid, peer reviewed research that can be transferred to making presentations? There’s a heck of a lot of opinion and tosh about presenting online. There’s an awful lot of opinion which is tosh, too, of course. Occasionally I’ve used some other form of seminal text (such as a House of Lords report for one chapter) but mainly it’s all down to hard-core research. After all, the whole point of the book is that it’s ‘definitive’. Nothing can ever be completely definitive, of course, but I’ve tried – at least the research I’ve used is seminal, which is a start…
- I’ve tried to keep it new, too, but if the broadest based research was a few years old I’ve gone with that. Sometimes the best research for you lot was done some years ago, and more current research has moved into more and more (over-)specific situations. In that case, I’ve tended to use the slightly older research, because it gives the best overview.
- Accessible. Okay, so the wasn’t the most important thing, but there were a couple of times when I simply couldn’t get hold of the basic research. I’ve been quite brutal here, in the sense of not using stuff-about-stuff, because my experience as a researcher is that a lot of stuff-about-stuff is rubbish. Quite a bit of it misses the main points of the original author and some of it is just wrooooongggg.
The result is what I like to think is an interesting balance, based on what people tell me they need but with answers based on research, not opinion. Sounds simple when you say it like that! :)
More soon (now that the blog is mended!) including a change in title!
