World's Best Presentation Contest Winners Announced FROM Guy Kawasaki's Blog

Slideshare.net announced the winners of the World's Best Presentation Contest today

(May 7, 2007):

Winners (chose by judges)

1. ShiftHappens by Jbrenman (the most interesting)
   

2. Meet Henry by Chereemoore

3. Sustainable Food Lab by Chrislandry

People’s Choice Winners

1. PaniPuri--An Introduction by Thakkar

2. ShiftHappens by Jbrenman

3. Meet Henry by Chereeemoore

The commonality you’ll see in these winners is big fonts, big graphics, and a “storytelling” orientation. These are three crucial qualities of a good presentation.

These may not be the best models for technical presentations, but they are still worth learning from.

Napoleon's Idiot

Though perhaps apocryphal, this story illustrates the importance of clear writing, as well as speaking.

. . . [Napoleon] kept a severely retarded man, an "idiot", on his staff to review all commands issued from his headquarters before they were sent. If, and only if, "Napoleon's Idiot" understood them and could explain them, would the orders then be sent to his brilliant field commanders. This avoided many serious errors on the battlefield.

I’m negative about appositives

FROM: An excerpt from Tim Curran's Blog.

It’s often said about broadcast writing that it should sound conversational, but what usually goes unsaid are all the little technical things and thoughtful phrasing that goes into giving written prose the feel of conversation. Those techniques will be a large part of my emphasis here.

One such important ‘rule’ (in quotes because, once well understood, rules can be treated as guidelines and cheerfully broken to achieve a desired effect) is avoiding appositives. An appositive is a word or phrase, set off by commas, that further describes the noun it follows. For example:

John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is now enjoying his retirement.

Appositives are incredibly common in print newswriting, but in my opinion, they should be incredibly rare in broadcast writing. The reason is, quite simply, that they are incredibly rare in conversational speech and a big red flag that what you’re hearing from your radio or TV was really intended to be read, not spoken.

So how to avoid them? The most common technique in broadcast writing is to turn an appositive into an adjective phrase:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili is now enjoying his retirement.