{"id":2902,"date":"2015-01-12T20:18:18","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T20:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=2902"},"modified":"2015-01-12T20:18:18","modified_gmt":"2015-01-12T20:18:18","slug":"the-book-its-finished-well-the-first-draft-at-least","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/the-book-its-finished-well-the-first-draft-at-least\/","title":{"rendered":"The book – it’s finished (well, the first draft at least!)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Well done me. It\u2019s done. Well, it isn\u2019t of course, \u2018cos there\u2019s all the re-wriing and so on, but the first drafts of all the substantive chapters are complete\u2026 and now some of them are out for feedback with some volunteers. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ll be able to compare all the different thoughts and see if there\u2019s an overview or consensus. (Not sure what I\u2019ll do if there isn\u2019t!) Then I can see if there\u2019s stuff i can take from that feedback and apply it to the other chapters.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
One of the questions I\u2019ve been asked a few times in the writing process is how I chose the chapters. Well\u2026.. it\u2019s been a bit of a heuristic process but the principles I\u2019ve used to guide my thinking are these:<\/div>\n
    \n
  • Is the topic one that is important to presenters, judging from my experience and\/or the number of times I\u2019ve been asked by clients to help them with it. That\u2019s the be-all-and-end-all\u2026 .sure there were other things I picked up on but this was the ultimate filter. If it didn\u2019t pass this test, it was out. (Which in some ways was a shame \u2018cos there were some fascinating potential chapters that got researched by not drafted. Maybe I\u2019ll write them up in this blog :) )<\/li>\n
  • Is their solid, peer reviewed research that can be transferred to making presentations? There\u2019s a heck of a lot of opinion and tosh about presenting online. There\u2019s an awful lot of opinion which is<\/b> tosh, too, of course. Occasionally I\u2019ve used some other form of seminal text (such as a House of Lords report for one chapter) but mainly it\u2019s all down to hard-core research. After all, the whole point of the book is that it\u2019s \u2018definitive\u2019. Nothing can ever be completely definitive, of course, but I\u2019ve tried – at least the research I\u2019ve used is seminal, which is a start…<\/li>\n
  • I\u2019ve tried to keep it new, too, but if the broadest based research was a few years old I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve tended to use the slightly older research, because it gives the best overview.<\/li>\n
  • Accessible. \u00a0Okay, so the wasn\u2019t the most important thing, but there were a couple of times when I simply couldn\u2019t get hold of the basic research. I\u2019ve 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    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! :)<\/p>\n

    More soon (now that the blog is mended!) including a change in title!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well done me. It\u2019s done. Well, it isn\u2019t of course, \u2018cos there\u2019s all the re-wriing and so on, but the first drafts of all the substantive chapters are complete\u2026 and now some of them are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1820,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2902"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2903,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2902\/revisions\/2903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}