Many years ago, I absolutely did not know how to make presentations. I won’t say that I’m great at it now either, but at some point, I realized that the fate of your project, team, and even just an idea depends on how you present it. And although my public speaking is still far from ideal, my presentations in the form of files and face-to-face, based on them, have clearly become much better. First, thanks to experienced colleagues who taught me to do it better and always expressed constructive feedback. Second, because work required me to do it more often, both using standard templates and more creative ones to sell a great idea. And third, because I became increasingly interested in what those who do this constantly recommend.
Surprisingly, when talking specifically about presentations as a set of slides, much can be learned from related fields. For example, the ability to structure your speech more competently and simply is also a key to success. And here many tips from the book “Write, Shorten” would be quite suitable (although I have many other issues with it). Guy Kawasaki in his book “Art of the Start 2.0” dedicates a separate section specifically to preparing presentations. Alexander Bogachev in “Charts That Persuade Everyone” shows how to better convey your thoughts through graphical representation. And Kirill Egerev’s book “This Button Needs Text,” although not related to presentations, touches on important aspects of creating short, concise, and clear texts for UI, and these rules are universal, so they work in presentations as well.
And recently, Alexander Grigoriev approached me, the author of another book dedicated specifically to presentations, but from the perspective of their textual, informational component. He was interested in my opinion (which is pleasant in itself). At the same time, the topic of such a book is very close to me, so it skipped past my entire reading queue and was read almost immediately.
Alexander Grigoriev is a copywriter who in recent years has specialized in writing texts for presentations, with many well-known brands among his clients. And although he initially thought that there was neither challenge nor interest in this work, after some time he realized that there are challenges through the roof, because simply throwing together information and finding a thread to the heart of those reading his texts are completely different things.
The main theme of the book is the ability to properly use words to convey the information that you want to communicate to the reader of your presentation. Here, the classic works of Korney Chukovsky and Nora Gal on fighting bureaucratic language come into play, as well as moving away from standard templates and avoiding the already tiresome common phrases that migrate from presentation to presentation but provide absolutely no benefit.
Alexander Grigoriev correctly points out that many managers receive dozens of presentations, and few are ready to immediately look at 15-30 slides with an abundance of text. Often they simply put it off until later, or even forget about it altogether, because, as they say, “too many letters – couldn’t handle it.” And here it’s important to grab attention, as well as to convey and interest literally from the start and just with a quick glance at the slides. This is exactly what the author talks about in his book.
Without going into details, I’ll try to formulate the main ideas that he offers in his book:
- Any phrase should be presented in a way that immediately conveys the most important information.
- The presentations we distribute are not made for ourselves (unlike those where slides are just aids to our narrative). People view them without the ability to ask you clarifying questions here and now. Therefore, when preparing such presentations and slides, always ask yourself whether the reader will understand everything you are trying to convey. Whether their knowledge is sufficient at all, whether they operate with the same terminology.
- Each presentation is unique, as it aims to convey your advantages and differences, you want to convince the reader to continue communication with you, choose your product, and so on. That’s why industrial templates only harm, as they create just another faceless presentation, practically killing creativity. Moreover, even your previously successful presentations should not be mindlessly used as a foundation, as they were likely created for different purposes and different audiences.
- The entire presentation and each slide should be suitable for quick review. 15-20 seconds (yes, seconds!) – and you’ve either captured attention, created a desire to learn more details, or lost that respondent almost forever.
- The presentation should not only generate interest, it should lead to a result – a call, meeting, investment, and so on. After all, you’re hardly spending so much time on it just to entertain the reader.
- For the sake of conveying the main idea and achieving the presentation’s goal, don’t be afraid to cut and trim everything non-essential. Some details will be needed later if you reach the meeting stage, but now they will only harm.
- So-called “meaningful headlines” are the key to success. The headline should answer the question of what is actually important here. That is, with a good headline, you can easily skip the rest of the slide, since the idea has already been conveyed, and below are just details. While general headlines describing what will be below are generally meaningless, because after them nothing is clear anyway, you need to read further.
And the author actively supports all these theses with examples, with a huge number of slides. But the actual text volume of the book is quite small, just over 20 thousand words. So even if you give yourself time to think about individual chapters, you can manage in two or three evenings.
What’s good about the book is the author’s attitude toward his advice. He considers them effective, but by no means a panacea for everything. Alexander acknowledges that in some cases, the system he developed won’t be suitable. Nevertheless, these general tips should not be overlooked: forewarned is forearmed. And if you don’t use some advice, you at least do it deliberately and understanding why you rejected it.
Besides working with words themselves, the author devotes considerable attention to the structure of both the slides and the presentation as a whole.
In the structure of slides, he shows how from a thought, from a phrase that you want to convey, you can organically divide the slide into complementary blocks, where each will carry a clear function. Moreover, not all of these blocks are verbal. A well-crafted “story” perfectly incorporates numbers, charts, company logos, and even illustrations.
He perceives the presentation itself not just as a set of slides, each of which should communicate some information. If each slide is a phrase, a thesis that reflects the main idea, ideally with a heading, and then harmoniously supports it with details, then the entire presentation is a connected narrative, a story. Where each slide is important and cannot be simply thrown out, because then either the story will suffer, or the slide was not actually needed.
I should note that when we work with slides as illustrations of our live storytelling, we usually create exactly such a story, because then each slide is a continuation of the previous one. Of course, some statistical or informational slides can be removed, but the truly significant ones work for your narrative. Here, Alexander Grigoriev shows that even without you as the author, the presentation should be able to “lead this narrative” for you.
In summary, I would say that I liked the book and it falls into my “Recommended” category. From the noted drawbacks, I would only mention that in the later sections, there are many slides with real examples from the author’s work, where there are direct mentions of clients, with links to their resources (I took the trouble to check some of them). For me, this approach looked like undisguised product placement. Additionally, some examples are too numerous: you’ve already grasped the idea, but the author keeps adding more and more, as if wanting to show all the best things he’s accomplished in life. The examples are good, but for the purpose of “presenting” what the author wanted to say, they’re clearly excessive, because, in his own words, the narrative breaks down, stalls, and these examples become redundant.
And although I slightly lowered the final rating, the book is worthy and mandatory reading for anyone who works with presentations. And it made me want to take a fresh look at everything we’ve been doing in our team lately.
My rating: 4/5
