Week 5: Clear-Making Your Presentation Stick

Anyone can create a presentation but making your presentation to stick is no easy task. During this week's lesson, we came across the concept of making your presentation to stand out and stick to the audience. Throughout my life, my experience with PowerPoint was not very pleasant at all . PowerPoint, to me, was a pointless presentation filled with bullet points and cluster of images. The word "fun" was the last thing to emerge into my mind when it comes to describing my feeling for PowerPoint. The book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, points out the criteria needed to build a successful presentation.

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There are five rules to help your presentation to stick:

1. Story and examples are the building blocks of the presentation

2. Don't preamble, parachute in

3. Let your main points hog the spotlight

4. Tease, don't tell

5. Bring reality to the room

These five rules can help us have a better understanding of how to create a PowerPoint presentation that can stick to the audience. The first rule is "Story and examples are the building blocks of the presentation". Story and examples can help your audience have a better understanding of the ideas you are trying to present. Story and examples can also connect with your audience in a more emotional level. The second rule from the book is "Don't preamble, parachute in". What it means is to not start your presentation with a boring introduction of what you are about to present, but instead be creative and surprise your audience.The third rule is a very important rule because it happens very often to all of our PowerPoints. "Let your main points hog the spotlight", let your main idea shine instead of putting more and more bullet points into another slide. The fourth rule is "Tease, don't tell", we need to tease our audience and make them demand more of our presentation. The last rule is "Bring reality to the room", this rule is easier to said than done. Instead of looking for images to present your main point, try bring reality into your audience. Show them what your main point is about by bringing objects and tools into your presentation.

In Conclusion, it is very important for us apply these rules into our future presentation because we want to be remembered. In today business world, no matter if you are trying to make a speech or making a PowerPoint, we need to make the presentation to stick.


This is a YouTube video from Dan Heath, one of the writer from the book. In this video, he explained the importance of remembering these five rules.

References
¹Heath, C., and D. Heath. Made to stick, why some ideas survive and others die. Random House Inc, 2007. Web. <https://elearning2.courses.ufl.edu/access/content/group/3daf3da5-cf1c-4806-853a-97219fc6c45a/ISM3004/MakingPresentationsThatStick.pdf>.