FOREWORD BY GUY KAWASAKI Presentation designer and internationally acclaimed communications expert Garr Reynolds, creator of the most popular Web site on presentation design and delivery on the Net — presentationzen.com — shares his experience in a provocative mix of illumination, inspiration, education, and guidance that will change the way you think about making presentations with PowerPoint or Keynote. Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.

Whether you’re making a formal presentation, wooing a client, closing a sale, or proposing an idea, persuasive communication is essential. Based on the same concepts that guide the author’s award-winning training and consulting company, Well Said! teaches business professionals to put themselves in their audience’s shoes and tailor their messages to the needs of decision makers. Darlene Price reveals the simple but powerful techniques you can use to prioritize, organize, and economize your words so that your communication wins the day. Complete with real-life examples illustrating the concepts in action, this handy guide shows how to: use the words and phrases that get people to listen, capture and hold an audience’s attention, gain instant credibility with decision makers, optimize body language, handle QA with finesse, make connections, shine with or without PowerPoint, perfect the elevator pitch. You don’t have to be a motivational speaker to get through to others. By placing words carefully and with confidence, you’ll captivate your audience and make big things happen in your career.

A clear and comprehensive framework for bridging the widening gap between theorists and empiricists in social science The credibility revolution, with its emphasis on empirical methods for causal inference, has led to concerns among scholars that the canonical questions about politics and society are being neglected because they are no longer deemed answerable. Theory and Credibility stakes out an opposing view—presenting a new vision of how, working together, the credibility revolution and formal theory can advance social scientific inquiry. This authoritative book covers the conceptual foundations and practicalities of both model building and research design, providing a new framework to link theory and empirics. Drawing on diverse examples from political science, it presents a typology of the rich set of interactions that are possible between theory and empirics. This typology opens up new ways for scholars to make progress on substantive questions, and enables researchers from disparate traditions to gain a deeper appreciation for each other's work and why it matters. Theory and Credibility shows theorists how to create models that are genuinely useful to empirical inquiry, and helps empiricists better understand how to structure their research in ways that speak to theoretically meaningful questions.

Learn how to communicate better with numbers Whether you are distributing a report or giving a presentation, you have a lot of numbers to present and only a few minutes to get your point across. Your audience is busy and has a short attention span. Don't let an amateur presentation bog you down, confuse your audience, and damage your credibility. Instead, learn how to present numerical information effectively—in the same way you learned how to speak or write. With Painting with Numbers, you'll discover how to present numbers clearly and effectively so your ideas and your presentation shine. Use the Arabic numeral system to your advantage master the use of layout and visual effects to communicate powerfully Understand how audiences process your information and how that affects your "personal brand image" Learn how to be perceived as a professional who truly understands the business concepts and issues underlying your numbers Use software tools, including Excel, PowerPoint, and graphs, efficiently and to drive home your point Author Randall Bolten shares his decades of experience as a senior finance executive distilling complicated information into clear presentations, to help you make your numerical information more comprehensible, meaningful, and accessible. Painting with Numbers is brimming with hands-on advice, techniques, tools, rules, and guidelines for producing clear, attractive, and effective quantation (the word the author has coined for the skill of presenting numbers).

Presentation Patterns is the first book on presentations that categorizes and organizes the building blocks (or patterns) that you’ll need to communicate effectively using presentation tools like Keynote and PowerPoint. Patterns are like the lower-level steps found inside recipes; they are the techniques you must master to be considered a master chef or master presenter. You can use the patterns in this book to construct your own recipes for different contexts, such as business meetings, technical demonstrations, scientific expositions, and keynotes, just to name a few. Although there are no such things as antirecipes, this book shows you lots of antipatterns—things you should avoid doing in presentations. Modern presentation tools often encourage ineffective presentation techniques, but this book shows you how to avoid them. Each pattern is introduced with a memorable name, a definition, and a brief explanation of motivation. Readers learn where the pattern applies, the consequences of applying it, and how to apply it. The authors also identify critical antipatterns: clichés, fallacies, and design mistakes that cause presentations to disappoint. These problems are easy to avoid—once you know how. Presentation Patterns will help you Plan what you’ll say, who you’ll say it to, how long you’ll talk, and where you’ll present Perfectly calibrate your presentation to your audience Use the storyteller’s “narrative arc” to full advantage Strengthen your credibility—and avoid mistakes that hurt it Hone your message before you ever touch presentation software Incorporate visuals that support your message instead of hindering it Create highly effective “infodecks” that work when you’re not able to deliver a talk in person Construct slides that really communicate and avoid “Ant Fonts,” “Floodmarks,” “Alienating Artifacts,” and other errors Master 13 powerful techniques for delivering your presentation with power, authority, and clarity Whether you use this book as a handy reference or read it from start to finish, it will be a revelation: an entirely new language for systematically planning, creating, and delivering more powerful presentations. You’ll quickly find it indispensable—no matter what you’re presenting, who your audiences are, or what message you’re driving home.

Through an engaging and humorous narrative, Peter Coughter presents the tools he designed to help advertising and marketing professionals develop persuasive presentations that deliver business. Readers will learn how to develop skills to create the perfect presentation.