FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Ahhh, PowerPoint. Love it for making it easy to organize ideas and create presentations. Hate it for guiding your ideas into a dull haze of bullet points that￯﾿ﾽs indistinguishable from everyone else￯﾿ﾽs. But it needn￯﾿ﾽt be that way. You can get beyond bullet points and bring real passion and punch back into your presentations. And your audiences will love you for it.

In Beyond Bullet Points, Cliff Atkinson introduces a proven system for supercharging any presentation. Atkinson taps into narrative techniques that have been captivating human audiences since Homer wrote down the Odyssey some 2,800 years ago, adding some lessons that Hollywood￯﾿ﾽs learned over the past century.

To wit: Your presentation works best as a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Your story comes together best when you start by scripting it -- putting aside fonts, colors, backgrounds, and slide transitions until much, much later. (Don￯﾿ﾽt know where to start? Start with Atkinson￯﾿ﾽs Sociable Media Story Template.)

Stories have action: Atkinson shows how to develop the action inherent in yours. Stories have resolutions. Your resolution is the solution you want your audience to adopt. Atkinson shows how to crystallize that, clarify it, and drive it home.

Once all that￯﾿ﾽs nailed down, he takes you the rest of the way: reading your script aloud, reviewing it with your team, visualizing your narrative with storyboards, creating a conversation, and maintaining engagement with your audience. By the time you￯﾿ﾽre done, you won￯﾿ﾽt just have a more coherent and compelling presentation -- you￯﾿ﾽll have the unshakable confidence to deliver it with passion. Bill Camarda, from the March 2005 Read Only

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