Anyone who knows anything about presenting will know that I (and anyone else who’s ever trained people to do presentations) is a fan of the Presentation Zen blog. See this post, for example.
I came across a nice interview with the man himself recently, which you can find here. My understanding is that the pages are about to be re-vamped (the one you can see is a behind the scenes one to let you at the permalink) so don’t be put off by the look of the place – the ‘real’ home of the blog (here) looks much, much nicer.
It’s well worth 10 or so minutes of anyone’s time. There’s nothing particularly new or earth-shattering there if you’ve read much Presentation Zen stuff before, but it’s a great introduction if you haven’t and a good reminder if you have.
Essentially, the basic idea behind the Zen approach to presentations is that “less is more”. Less words, particularly. So few words, ideally, that you don’t even have bullet points. Personally I use them when they’re appropriate – which is almost never, but I’m doing a presentation tomorrow with two such slides on them…. though one of them is an illustration of “how to do it wrong” so I guess that doesn’t count. Zen indeed! :)
