Crucially as well as a more immediate objective, the presenter has the opportunity to control the audience’s focus and pace their exposure to the information. Getting this right takes some understanding of how we pay attention and process information, and can mean clearly articulating the message and influencing behaviour. Getting it wrong makes the presentation a waste of time, even more so if hours have gone into the design.

It’s far more important to help the audience understand and remember the key messages than to help the presenter get through the ordeal of delivering them. That’s why we need to know how to manipulate attention and memory before we even consider how to execute the design.

Without cynicism, an understanding of audiences’ cognitive processes is absolutely central to the sales presentation methodology we follow and recommend. We believe that knowing how to get through to your audience and make sure they can retain your message for longer is a clear advantage. So we make sure every presentation we produce achieves those things, and that’s how we improve sales for our clients.

For me to enjoy a good book, I need the author to have created a compelling story that retains my attention. A quality storyteller does this through carefully structuring and developing the content. They don’t do it by taking night classes in psychology and trying to figure out how the reader processes each word, line or chapter.

Apologies if I’m questioning your approach but I’m yet to be convinced that this over analysis is helpful. Cynically, I’d question if it’s more about your sales message rather than really helping the presenter.

Effective presenting is not just about displaying the information in a clear and attractive way, but making sure audiences cannot ignore it, find it easy to assimilate, and become influenced by it in the long-term. To achieve this we need some understanding of how people process and store information, and how to apply the design principles in that context. Otherwise we might have beautiful slides without a memorable message.

As I said, this is one of the best books on presentations I’ve read, but that’s what I felt was missing, not necessarily large tracts of theory.

A flaky understanding of this means that too many people spout cod psychology rather than going back to the basics of structure and design.

I like the clear colorful approach of the book. It provides a useful touchstone for powerful presentations.