Presentation Skills

Researchers and analysts have some unique challenges when it comes to presenting their data and analysis. We are often more focused on the data, statistics, and estimation results than soaring rhetoric or specific calls to action. That means we’re prone…

The Jewish High Holidays have come and gone. At this year’s service for the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), the senior rabbi at my temple, Rabbi Amy Schwartzman, gave a thoughtful sermon about the words we use and how they…

Far too many presenters pack their slides with far too much information: text, bullet points, graphs, data markers, data labels, and collections of images. This information-dump encourages the audience to read the slides and spend less time listening to you…

Today I’m pleased to announce that my book on creating and delivering better presentation design is available for pre-order! Better Presentations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks (published by Columbia University Press) ships this fall. I wrote this book because…

I’m a big fan of free stuff. Big fan. It’s basically why I take my kids to the Auto Show ever year. It’s why the exhibit area of every conference is so awesome—free pens, USB keys, phone wipes, even candy….

A few months ago, I wrote a post on why PowerPoint is not to blame for bad presentations. In that post, I also promised to publish snippets from the book I’m writing on presentation skills with Columbia University Press. Turns…

This post was originally published on PresentationXpert blog. For people presenting scientific or technical information, there are often specific tables and numbers they wish to show: Descriptive data, summary statistics and regression results, for example. Sometimes those details need to…

As summer winds to a close, I find myself looking back at the presentations I gave over the past few months. In June alone, I gave nearly 20 different presentations: keynotes in large rooms (sometimes during lunch), seminar presentations in small…