Review: Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen is an amazing book which manages to take something as seemingly pedestrian as creating better presentations and turn it into a celebration of life. No mean feat, that.

Presentation Zen is the kind of book you want to carry with you to every presentation you see and hand to every person who exposes you to Death by PowerPoint. You know exactly what that means: The droning over slides groaning under the weight of text interspersed with tacky clipart. Read Presentation Zen and you’ll never subject your audience to torment like that again.

This wonderful book can literally save corporate America billions of dollars a year of time wasted half-asleep in half-lit rooms.

It would be wrong to harvest the points Reynolds makes and post them on the Web, but one takeaway in particular deserves to be shouted out loud from the rooftops: Don’t don’t don’t create “slideuments,” that unholy mix of slideshow and handout that doesn’t work as either. Instead, create slides that work as slides, and if you need to leave a handout, create a written document that can stand alone.

I can’t recommend Presentation Zen highly enough. Buy it and cherish it.