Once, when I picked up a book from the local library, the librarian asked to tell her what I thought about the book when I would bring it back. Well, why not write a few lines about all the books I read so everybody could see what I thought about it? I'm often also happy to have friends recommend a certain book or tell me this and that is not really worth reading. I won't comment about the tons of books I have read so far, but about books I read from now on.
| highly recommended | sehr empfohlen | |
| good reading | gutes lesematerial | |
| average | durchschnittlich | |
| not too interesting | nicht allzu interessant | |
| recommended not to read it | empfehlung das buch nicht zu lesen |
 |
|
|---|---|
| title | presentation zen |
| author | Garr Reynolds |
| ISBN-10 | 0-321-52565-5 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-321-52565-9 |
| ASIN | |
| rating | |
| date | 2010-Apr-05 |
Presentations these days are mostly done with powerpoint slides containing bullet list after bullet list full of text and numbers. And it seems this terrible presentation style is getting worse and worse.
Have you ever paid attention to how you listen to such a presentation yourself? Joe average tries to decipher the text which actually is much too small to read while attempting to listen to the presenter at the same time and by the time Joe average managed to get through half of the slide's text, the next one is put on. At the end? Instead of any wiser Joe average is tired and irritated.
Garr Reynolds is one of the seemingly diminishing number of people who (still) know that a presentation is not the same as a documentation. While his book is not a step by step cookbook for better presentations, he clearly points out the principles and shows examples. Principles, which lead to much better, less tiring, more memorable presentations which are not only more enjoyable, but also have a much better chance to bring your key points clearly to your audience. Simplicity, strong visuals, planning, story and less text.
While I knew and tried to apply part of the principles to a certain degree, reading this book really encourages me to even much much more go against the common-non-sense and again apply more commonsense, to use more radical deviations from the usual malpractice. It also opened my eyes for things I had not yet considered.
Presentations would be so much better if it was impossible to open powerpoint before having read this book...
