Product Description

Making PowerPoint presentations that are clear, compelling, memorable, and even enjoyable is not an obscure art. In this book, Stephen Kosslyn, a renowned cognitive neuroscientist, presents eight simple principles for constructing a presentation that takes advantage of the information modern science has discovered about perception, memory, and cognition. Using hundreds of images and sample slides, he shows the common mistakes many people make and the simple ways to fix them. For example, never use underlining to emphasize a word, the line will cut off the bottom of letters that have descending lines (such as p and g), which interferes with the brain's ability to recognize text. Other tips include why you should state your conclusion at the beginning of a presentation, when to use a line graph versus a bar graph, and how to use color correctly. By following Kosslyn's principles, anyone will be able to produce a presentation that works!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #90213 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

Power Point
This book is exactly what I was looking for. It provides some rudementary lessons for formulating solid powerpoint presentations. It's also a great at taking it back to basics.

Adds nothing new to the powerpoint body of knowledge
Professor Kosslyn must have sat through an awful lot of dreadful powerpoint presentations to come up with the material for this book.

Sadly we have all had to sit through most of the howlers he describes, but having read this book, I am not convinced there is anything ground breaking about his recommendations. This is stuff we have seen before and presented in a more informative way by the likes of Dave Paradi, Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds.

The other ideas in this book, such as 'The Principle of relevance - communication is most effective when neither too much nor too little information is presented' is more a statement of the blindly obvious than a deep psychological insight and is practically repeated in Principle 8 - people have a limited capacity to retain and to process information and so will not understand a message if too much information must be retained or processed.'

If you are looking to polish your powerpoint, there are better books on the market and no better way than to go along to your local toastmasters group, deliver presentations and read the feedback you are given.