It’s been quite a while since I updated you all on the progress of the book. I’m not even sorry, I’ve been too busy writing it! :) Let’s start with the basics before I start to rant…
Credit Pixabay
There’s to be precious little ‘opinion’ in this book. I spent over two decades of my life as a research scientist, so this is all based on hardcore research. Most of it comes from articles in peer-reviewed journals, a bit from books, and one or two chapters are taken from other definitive sources. (My personal favourite for this is the chapter on fonts, which I’ve taken from official regulations on emergency signposts – after all, you can’t have anything that needs to be more easily read than that, can you! :) )
There’s a big issue with a lot of authors and presenters (and even shoddy journalists), which really gets my goat, and it’s this: what they do is, essentially, bad journalism. It often starts with an idea for a story and the authors research until they’ve got enough material to fill their space limit – and then stop.
That’s not research
That’s finding facts to back up the opinion or idea you first started with. Research is about starting with no opinion and forming that opinion based upon what emerges from the research. The former is easier and more fun. And there’s a place for it. But it’s not proper research.
Of the forty content-chapters I’m allowed, I’ve drafted well over half. There are another half a dozen flapping around in some form of chaotic state, either because I’ve just not had chance to finish them off, or because I’m waiting to get hold of a key piece of research before I can fill in the formal blanks or, for a few, because the darn thing just didn’t work out right and I need to go back to the drawing board. I have to confess that most of these were written when I was trying to do something else at the same time – and I knew at the time this was a bad idea… but like most of us I forgot the simple rules of multi-tasking and thought I was immune to them, or special. What rules of multi-tasking you ask? Simple.
Multi-tasking is pretty much a myth
And that’s an idea you can apply to your presentations as well as the research for a book about presentations! If you ask your audiences to concentrate on too many things at once, they’ll fail at all of them to some extent or another. Turns out this is not only true of authors, it’s true of me. I’m not superhuman.
Dammit!
There’s a question implicit in all of this research about how I’m deciding what to research and by extension what chapters to include in the book. I’m rather ducking this question a bit, and trying to write more chapters than I need. I’ll sort out what to exclude after I’ve written them and put them together. As it turns out, however, certain themes are starting to emerge and it’s tempting to go down those lines a lot: I’m resisting doing that because once a point has been made it’s more important for readers to get breadth, not more un-necessary depth.
A bit of a theme that’s starting to emerge is that there’s a tremendous mix of advice out there for would-be presenters. For example, the style of powerpoint design pushed by Lee Jackson in his book has quite a bit of science supporting it. Other stuff, such as how to create lists… well, not so much. That’s both very annoying and frustrating for me as a presentation skills trainer and speaker but it also proves the need for the book, so I can’t complain. :)
Here’s a confession – I’m outsourcing some of the raw research. I’ve asked two different people to work as research assistants for me. Don’t panic, they’re not really doing the research, but they’re doing much of the slog in the libraries (and online). Why? Because they’re better and faster at it than I am. What I’m better at is reading the research, understanding it and writing about it (I hope!). A little outsourcing of specialist functions is making progress a lot easier and faster.
That’s something else we might consider for our presentations, too. I’m not suggesting outsourcing the brain-work, but some of the leg-work can be hived off. If you know your subject but not how to use graphics packages, why would you spend time tweaking the images you use to adjust the colour saturation? It can take you as many hours to get it right as and expert will take minutes.
So there you go – not very structured, I know, but hopefully useful. I’m a bit pushed for time (did you know I’ve got a book deadline?!) and as the man said, it’s quicker to write something long than something short ;)
Oh, and Happy Christmas, everyone!
