How to Help Your Audience Visualize Your Speech

August 14 2008

Speechwriters and those who give presentations strive, or at least should strive, to help their audiences visualize a story or concept. If you’ve seen bad PowerPoint presentations, the speaker did not have that in mind when s/he flashed up slide after slide of mind-numbingly boring text. As I’ve written several times before, if slides are used in a speech, they should aim to only compliment the speech by providing visuals and only minimal text.

This concept is well illustrated in Dan Roam’s new book, The Back of the Napkin. In it, he argues that a simple drawing can be more powerful than any excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation.

Below is a video that outlines the concept further.