PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Why Use Slideshows at All?

Geetesh Bajaj — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 04:00:22 +0000

In a 2001 article in Small Business Computing, writer Angela Garber expressed the universally negative reputation of cluttered slideshows by coining the frequently cited epithet, Death by PowerPoint. Given the constant disparagement of slideshows by critics, audiences, and even by presenters themselves, why would anyone continue to use them?

After all, the memorable speeches of history did not use PowerPoint:

Cicero’s orations in the Roman Forum
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Winston Churchill’s World War II rally to arms
Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights speech
John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address

President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address.
President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address

So why, indeed, would anyone use slides? The simple answer lies in the aphorism, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Those familiar words are backed by a wide array of scientific evidence. One of the most thorough is an HP publication titled, The Power of Visual Communication, which cites nine learned sources and concludes that:

Recent research supports the idea that visual communication can be more powerful than verbal communication, suggesting in many instances that people learn and retain information that is presented to them visually much better than that which is only provided verbally.

Even more to the (Power) point is the opinion of Stephen M. Kosslyn, the author of Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, a book based on his work at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. As Dr. Kosslyn put it in one of his academic studies:

The timeworn claim that a picture is worth a thousand words is generally well-supported by empirical evidence, suggesting that diagrams and other information graphics can enhance human cognitive capacities in a wide range of contexts and applications.

Another respected expert on visual expression was Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor and statistician, whose revolutionary graphical display methodology electrified his high-profile TED conference and made him an instant media and talk circuit rock star. Ten thousand words would not be adequate to describe his technique, so please see it for yourself in his video on YouTube.

Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats – BBC.
Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes – The Joy of Stats – BBC

A New York Times article about Dr. Rosling described the impact of his graphics:

The goal of information visualization is not simply to represent millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension, moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more.

In that one sentence, Dr. Rosling, his dynamic software notwithstanding, validates the primacy of the presenter over even his superb graphics. More than that, he tells you not only why, but how to use your slides.

This blog is an excerpt from my book Winning Strategies for Power Presentations published by Pearson. Also, check out my newly released Presentation Trilogy—Presenting to Win, The Power Presenter, and In the Line of Fire—available on Amazon and other retailers.

Jerry Weissman is the founder and president of Suasive, Inc., formerly Power Presentations, Ltd. Jerry founded Suasive in 1988 and quickly established himself as the coach for Silicon Valley CEOs delivering critical presentations for their IPO roadshows. He taught them to tell their company stories through the eyes of their investors, and in so doing, significantly increased the valuations of their companies. He amassed an elite client list and soon widened his focus to helping public and privately held companies develop and deliver all types of business presentations.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

The post Why Use Slideshows at All? appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 20, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:30:52 +0000

This issue is about doing the job properly the first time. SimpleDim brings real measurements into PowerPoint, so a warehouse layout or a floor plan on a slide is not just a picture but an actual, to-scale drawing you can trust. Laszlo Diewald’s Dynamic Grid 2 does the same for data: one click refreshes your table straight from SharePoint, so the numbers in the room are always the current numbers, not last week’s. And Ramgopal’s book, Clear Slides, makes the same argument about thinking: organize your ideas before you open PowerPoint, because a clear head makes a clear slide. Three different tools, one simple rule: get it right early, and the rest gets easier.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 20, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Dynamic Grid 2: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

Geetesh Bajaj — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 04:00:46 +0000

Laszlo Diewald has been working as a consultant for more than 10 years now. He started his career as an employee right after his study at the Technical University of Munich. Shortly after, he decided to become self-employed as a freelance consultant. In 2017, he founded his own consultancy, with a focus on large scale projects in the financial sector. In parallel, he started working on presentaid, which was finally launched in April 2022.

In this conversation, Laszlo talks about presentaid’s new Dynamic Grid 2.

Geetesh: Laszlo, let’s start with the “why.” Dynamic Grid has been part of presentaid for some time. What led you to rebuild it as v2 instead of adding features one at a time, and was SharePoint support the main driver, or part of a larger plan?

Laszlo: Dynamic Grid started as a way to solve one problem: stop rebuilding the same PowerPoint tables from Excel every week. That worked well as a one-way, single-source tool. But as more teams adopted it, the requests started stacking up – SharePoint access, on-demand refresh, richer column types, more styling control – and every one of them touched the same underlying assumption: that a grid was built once from Excel and stayed static after that. Bolting each request onto that architecture individually would have meant patching the same weak spot again and again.

So, instead we rebuilt the engine underneath the Dynamic Grid to treat data as something live and swappable, not a one-time import. SharePoint support was the single most requested feature, but it was really the forcing function for a bigger plan: make the grid work the way our users’ data actually lives – spread across Excel, SharePoint, and pivot tables – and keep it connected instead of frozen the moment you paste it in. All the visuals that presentaid creates are pixel-perfect, PowerPoint native shapes, not just a rendered image from a source.

presentaid feature DG SharePoint Refresh.
presentaid feature DG SharePoint Refresh

Geetesh: Tell us how v2 changes day-to-day work for existing presentaid users.

Laszlo: The biggest shift is the Refresh button.

Before, updating a grid meant triggering it freshly from Excel, applying the same filters, choosing the correct template and so on. Now it’s one click, inside PowerPoint, and the data’s current. For anyone whose source of truth lives in a SharePoint list rather than an Excel file, they can finally point the grid straight at it instead of exporting to Excel first as a workaround.

The new column types: flags, sliders, and bar charts replace a lot of manual conditional formatting people were doing by hand.

And being able to add several columns at once or go back and edit a saved template instead of rebuilding it, just removes friction from the parts of the job that were never the interesting part anyway.

Geetesh: For teams or individuals still creating grids by hand or relying on static Excel links, how would you describe the value of upgrading to v2?

Laszlo: The honest cost of the manual approach isn’t really the time – though that adds up – it’s the risk. A static link or a copy-pasted table is only accurate the moment you built it. Show up to a steering committee with last week’s numbers because nobody remembered to refresh the deck, and that’s a credibility problem, not just an inconvenience. Dynamic Grid V2 means the numbers in the room are the numbers in the source system, on demand, without anyone needing to remember to update anything. If you’re producing the same report on a recurring basis – status decks, trackers, board updates – that reliability compounds every single cycle.

Geetesh: Is there a trial version of presentaid including the new Dynamic Grid 2 available for readers who want to try it themselves?

Laszlo: Yes, we offer a free trial that contains all features, including the new Dynamic Grid. This trial is valid for 30 days, and no credit card is required.

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Clear Slides: Conversation with Ramgopal M. S.

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 04:00:29 +0000

Ramgopal M. S. is the founder of Presentation Process and author of Clear Slides. Over the past 20 years, he has helped millions of professionals communicate complex ideas through clear, engaging presentations. His YouTube channel has over 560,000 subscribers, where he shares practical PowerPoint and presentation design techniques.

In this conversation, Ramgopal discusses his new book, Clear Slides.

Geetesh: Ramgopal, what made you write Clear Slides now, and who did you have in mind as the reader while writing it?

Ramgopal: : I’ve been helping people create presentations for more than 20 years. And over time, I’ve noticed something. When people struggle with presentations, they often think they need better slides. They look for better designs, templates, and visuals. But sometimes, the problem isn’t the slides at all. They have a lot of knowledge, but they aren’t sure how to organize it or explain it clearly to someone else.

That’s what I wanted to address in Clear Slides. I wanted to help people think through their ideas before they start making slides. I had doctors in mind when I wrote the book. Doctors know a great deal about their subjects, but they also need to present research, explain clinical cases, and teach other people. And explaining something clearly is a skill in itself.

So, even if someone knows their subject very well, that doesn’t automatically make them a good presenter. Knowing something and explaining it are two different skills. When you know a subject well, you can easily forget how much you know that your audience doesn’t. You might jump straight into the details without giving people enough background to understand them. The challenge is to take what you know and organize it in a way that makes sense to someone who is listening to you for the first time.

I felt there was a need for a book that would help doctors with this part of their work. But the problem isn’t limited to doctors. Anyone who needs to explain something complex to others can face the same difficulty. That’s what makes this subject interesting to me.

Geetesh: The book’s subtitle is A Doctor’s Guide to Turn Complex Ideas into Clear Presentations. But readers from other fields have also praised the book in their Amazon reviews. What drew you to clinicians as your audience, and what carries over to everyone else? /strong>

Ramgopal: I chose doctors because I could see how important clear communication is in their work. They deal with a lot of complex information. When they present a clinical case or research findings, they need to help their audience understand what the information means and how the different pieces fit together. And I realized that this is not just a problem doctors face.

Think about an engineer explaining a technical problem, a consultant presenting a business strategy, or a teacher explaining a difficult concept. They all face the same basic challenge. They know their subject thoroughly, but their audience may not know as much as they do.

The engineer may understand exactly why a system is failing, but the audience needs to understand the reasoning behind the conclusion.

The consultant may have studied a business problem for weeks but has only a few minutes to explain what matters and what needs to be done.

The teacher may know a subject inside out but still needs to find a way to make it understandable to students.

The situations are different, but the underlying problem is similar.

Would I say that this book isn’t just about medical presentations? Is it about explaining complex ideas? That’s a fair way of putting it. The examples may come from medicine, but the basic principles apply much more broadly. You need to decide what your audience needs to understand, organize your ideas, and show how the different pieces fit together. You can’t simply put all your knowledge on slides and expect the audience to make sense of it. You have to guide them through the explanation.

Stop struggling with confusing presentations. Learn how to design clear slides that ensure your audience actually understands your ideas.
Why I Finally Wrote Clear Slides After 20 Years of Teaching Presentations

Geetesh: Most books on presentations are method guides. They give you principles, frameworks, and steps to follow. Why did you decide to tell Clear Slides as a story?

Ramgopal: I could have written a book that simply listed the principles of creating clear presentations. There is nothing wrong with that approach. But I wanted readers to see how these ideas work in real situations. It’s one thing to tell someone, “You should organize your ideas before making slides.” It’s quite another to show someone struggling with a presentation, making mistakes, and slowly figuring out what works. When you follow a character through that process, you can see why certain approaches fail and why others work better.

Some might say that a framework is more practical, because you can refer to it whenever you need to create a presentation. Yes, frameworks are definitely useful. They give you a process to follow. But knowing the steps and knowing how to apply them are two different things. Suppose I give you a framework that says you should identify your central message before making slides. You may understand that instruction perfectly well. However, when you sit down to create your next presentation, you may still struggle to decide what that central message should be. That’s where seeing someone work through the problem can help. You see the choices they make, the mistakes they run into, and how they eventually find a better way forward.

Creating a clear presentation isn’t just about following a sequence of steps. You have to make decisions. What should I include? What can I leave out? What does my audience need to understand first? How do I connect one idea to the next? A framework can guide those decisions. But a story helps you see why those decisions matter and what happens when you get them wrong.

Geetesh: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

Ramgopal: My hope is that readers won’t just learn a few presentation techniques. I want them to start thinking differently about their presentations. Instead of immediately opening PowerPoint and asking, “How should I design these slides?”, I want them to pause and ask, “What exactly am I trying to explain, and how can I make it easier for someone else to understand?” Because once you get that part right, creating the slides becomes a much more meaningful exercise.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

The post Clear Slides: Conversation with Ramgopal M. S. appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 13, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:30:07 +0000

This issue is about what happens when you stop leaving things to chance. The guides tutorial shows how a line on a slide is never just a line: it snaps, it inherits, it governs, and it will quietly run your layout if you let it. Understanding that is the difference between slides that look deliberate and slides that look lucky. Avinash Panneerselvam’s AECharts interview takes the same idea into charting: polished, animated, design-first charts that drop cleanly into any deck without negotiating with PowerPoint’s own chart engine. And Matteo Cassese’s Founder Journey conversation goes further still, asking what it means to move from telling stories to building myths, and whether your presentations belong to a bigger narrative you haven’t named yet.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: October 13, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

AECharts: Conversation with Avinash Panneerselvam

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 04:00:10 +0000

Avinash (Avi) Panneerselvam graduated in Computational Engineering from IIT Madras in 2020 and spent the next five years as a data scientist, building prediction models, mostly at early-stage AI startups. As AI began reshaping software engineering, he left my job to build something of his own. He started working on AECharts in January 2026, and launched it in February, when it also got its first customer.

In this conversation, Avi talks about AECharts.

Geetesh: Avi, tell us about yourself and what motivated you to create AECharts? Was there a problem you were trying to solve when you started AECharts?

Avi: I used to work in Data Science building AI models at companies like Ola, ShareChat etc. Through social media, I saw business leaders sharing insightful charts from their industry. These were often poorly made screenshots from other tools. People were also investing significant effort in making animated charts in complex design software. This pushed me to build a tool that put charts first with good design defaults and the ability to generate animated chart videos in one click. Over time, I saw an increasing number of users creating video charts for slides and reports as well. This led to expanding the supported charts to commonly used business charts like waterfall, scatter etc.

Today, AECharts is a browser-based tool that gives you well-designed charts by default, with one-click image/video export, smart annotations and an AI assistant. It’s built for analysts, consultants, and founders who need polished charts for slides, reports and social media without design software.

Geetesh: AECharts is browser based, and charts leave it as images or video. What does a typical workflow look like, from creating a chart to placing it on a slide in PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Keynote?

Avi: In the current workflow, a user selects a chart type. They are then presented with a default chart with sample data.

Users can then upload their data as CSV or Excel sheets, or edit the spreadsheet within the app.

Then, they can customize details like title, colors etc. They can also set the chart size to match their slide.

AECharts supports AI assistance so users can just ask AI to make changes for e.g. “change the bar colors to shades of blue”, or “rotate the x axis labels by 45 degrees.” This is much easier than learning a new interface and remembering how to change something.

AECharts also supports smart annotations such as level difference, CAGR arrows etc. that stay connected and update automatically as the data (say, a number changed in the spreadsheet) or the chart size changes. Users can add annotations using the AI assistant as well.

We currently support PNG, transparent PNG, SVG and MP4 export formats. Users can export and then insert the chart in their slide. A transparent PNG drops cleanly onto any slide theme or background, and an MP4 can be inserted as a video on the slide.

Geetesh: Charts exported as images can’t be edited in PowerPoint. Is that a deliberate choice, or do you plan to offer editable charts or a PowerPoint add-in?

Avi: It’s a deliberate choice: keeping charts as images means the design, animations and annotations look the same in PowerPoint, Google Slides or Keynote. Slides are increasingly being created with AI (even inside PowerPoint). And I see AECharts becoming the hub where charts are made and kept agnostic to the document type within which the chart is inserted. The users’ AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) can then create, edit, pull and insert the chart into the deck as needed. For example, “add the Q3 revenue chart to slide 5.” We’re working with our early adopters to bring this to life soon.

Geetesh: How much does AECharts cost? Also, do you have a trial option available?

Avi: AECharts costs $12/month for a monthly subscription and $120/yr for an annual subscription. The annual plan is akin to getting two months free. Yes, we offer trials on request.

You can also start free: every feature is included, and exports carry a small watermark that goes away when you upgrade.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

The post AECharts: Conversation with Avinash Panneerselvam appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Working with Guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:45:50 +0000

Let’s start with the basics: what are guides? Picture a tailor’s cutting table, marked with faint chalk lines that keep every cut straight and every seam aligned. Guides do the same job on a PowerPoint slide, except this time, you’re the tailor, and the chalk never runs out. Every guide can be moved, added, or deleted entirely on your terms. Nothing is fixed in place unless you decide it should be. But here’s the twist nobody warns you about: the moment guides show up on your slide, they stop being polite background lines and start quietly running the show. Snapping is built in, permanently switched on, no settings buried three menus deep. Let an object wander even a little too close, and it clicks into place before you’ve finished dragging, like a magnet that’s been lying in wait the whole time. You won’t aim. You won’t nudge pixel by pixel. The guide will simply decide you’re done.

Learn how to work with guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows.

The post Working with Guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 29, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:30:47 +0000

This issue starts with a mystery. You add a guide in PowerPoint, and it won’t move. You didn’t lock it. You didn’t protect it. It just sits there. The hierarchical guide options tutorial solves that one. Then Paul Lukehart arrives with SimpleDim, a CAD add-in that gives PowerPoint the ability to measure real-world distances, which sounds impossible until you try it. Claudyne Wilder has a quieter provocation: your slides are fine, your data is solid, and your audience is still not connecting. A story fixes that faster than another bullet point ever will. And Jerry Weissman returns with Writer’s Block II, because apparently the first one wasn’t enough to unstick everyone.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 29, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Founder Journey: Conversation with Matteo Cassese

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:00:50 +0000

Matteo Cassese is a business coach for entrepreneurs and keynote speaker with over twenty years of experience across corporate, startup, and creative worlds. He has worked with Warner Bros., Netflix, Sony, LinkedIn, and Vinted, and spoken on stages like SXSW and Gitex. During seven years at Warner Bros. Pictures, he helped launch more than 140 films. Based in Berlin, he helps founders and executives build businesses on their own terms.

In this conversation, Matteo speaks about his post, Founder’s Journey.

Geetesh: Matteo, you’ve moved from corporate storytelling to keynote speaking over the years. What shifted in how you show up in front of people along the way?

Matteo: Over the last few years I transitioned from trainer and facilitator to keynote speaker and coach. And I transitioned from hard skills to soft skills.

I moved from believing that the solution is learning something new, learning the craft, to seeing that the craft is just part of the solution. From believing that the solution is outside in (I come in as a trainer, teach you a technique, and then you are going to apply it flawlessly) to thinking that everyone is complete in every possible way, and that my job is to make you want to unearth your innate abilities. So the work is done from the inside out.

And after you have done the work from the inside out, obviously the technique will help. You need the hard skills, you need the craft, you need the repetitions. But if we have started from the inside, then whatever you do will have so much more power.

Geetesh: You’ve spoken about the difference between confidence and courage, saying confidence is something you decide rather than something you have. How does that idea show up for you when you’re about to walk on stage?

Matteo: In the five minutes before I go on stage I do a small meditation. I focus my thoughts on the audience, and on the gifts that I have for the audience. And then I focus on the idea of having fun together with the audience. I decide that what is going to happen is: we are going to have fun.

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Then I do my little run up the stage. Hopefully the stage is big enough. And lo and behold, that inner intention of having fun, and that confidence that we are going to have fun, is already in the room. The people are already smiling. I haven’t said a thing. I just enter the room with a certain energy.

It does take courage to step on stage. But it takes confidence to do that in a way that is intentional. The intention can also be: scare everybody, or be gloomy, or be boring. But that you embody that intention: that is confidence. And that is a decision.

Geetesh: In your Founder Journey post, you describe a “zero-confidence strategy,” where you invest your confidence in yourself rather than in whether a specific talk or video succeeds. Can you talk about how that plays out for you when a presentation doesn’t go the way you hoped?

Matteo: I am privileged that after a presentation I always have another presentation. After a talk, I always have another talk. After a video, I always have another video. So, if the presentation, the talk or the video bombs, it provides a learning opportunity for the next one. At the talk level, I want to have zero confidence. Zero, on purpose, because then I can allow the talk to fail. That is what I call the zero-confidence strategy. I can allow a video to fail miserably without becoming a failure.

However, there is an enormous amount of guilt and shame in failing, especially when you fail at the very human job of inspiring, entertaining, motivating and moving an audience in front of you. And most of the time it boils down to not being enough in the moment. Whenever you sense that something is off, that is where you should change your plan. Oftentimes speakers have their big narrative arc, and I myself, I find myself carried away: oh, they are going to get into it, they are going to understand it, I only need to get to that peak, I only need to get to that idea. And instead, the most excellent speakers realize in real time that the feedback is not good. They slow down. They stop. They involve the audience. They change their plans.

Learn to make real Roman carbonara and I’ll throw in the ancient art of storytelling for free.
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The more I learn about the art of stagecraft, the more I realize that what you prepared is in the background, something you can go back to. What you are doing is something unique for the audience in front of you. Your senses are heightened, and if you feel that something is off, this is the moment for you to go off script.

In the broader sense, obviously you learn a lot from every failure, and you can bring that failure into your confidence. You say: okay, now I know that I shouldn’t do that, so I can be more confident the next time. You use experience as a proxy for confidence. But in reality, what a real keynote speaker is trying to do is to disappear. To disappear into the room and just be in the hearts and the minds of the people in the room. And to do that, you not only need a compelling story, but you also have to be in the moment.

Geetesh: Over the years you’ve gone from storytelling to myth-making. What does that look like when you’re preparing a talk or a message for an audience, and what is the difference between the two?

Matteo: Three years ago, I was on a plane coming back from a retreat. And I kept thinking: I have defined my career through storytelling, but what is bigger than storytelling? And it struck me that stories are usually parts, little fragments of something bigger, which is a myth.

You don’t have to think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey to think about myths. We live in a society of myths. AI right now is a myth. Cybersecurity is this mythological threat.

Apple as a whole is a mythology, right? Linux is the rising mythology of a way of tech that is free and open source. All the big movements have story points, but then they are part of a mythology.

Now, if I think of a talk simply in terms of story, what I want to do is take the audience somewhere. I want to bring them to another place, and by bringing them somewhere unfamiliar, I am going to change them. Then they go back to their day changed.

If I think of this as a myth maker, I am going to try and have them not go back to the world where they were living before but actually enter a new world from there. So I am going to have not just one story, but maybe ten stories, and these ten stories will represent a mythology. Let’s say these ten stories are ten products for Apple: the iPhone, the Mac, the HomePod, the Apple Watch and so on. You see how there are building blocks to a mythology. And then everything is under the same symbol, the bitten apple. Symbolism today is expressed by design. So we want a powerful brand that determines a design style, and this design style determines the look and feel and the vibe that everything has.

But ultimately, why do we design stuff? Because we want people to say: I’m a Mac, I’m a PC. That is the ultimate goal of myth making, for people to say: I subscribe, I belong to this myth. I wear Nike because I believe in performance, and I believe that with enough repetitions I will make it big.

So, whenever I am thinking about my little story, I am thinking: where does this keynote belong in the mythology that I am creating, in the brand that I am creating, in the product lineup that I am creating? And what sense of belonging is it giving to the ones who are going to listen to it?

Geetesh: Matteo, where can readers go from here?

Matteo: Three parting gifts. First, I have three premium courses free for everybody to take. Mindset, Pitch and Story. Second, if you want to follow me and get all my insights, subscribe to my YouTube channel. And third, if you don’t believe in the algorithm and want everything in your email, this is my newsletter.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

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Breaking Through Writer’s Block II

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:00:38 +0000

By Jerry Weissman

The step-by-step process to get past the proverbial blank page of the previous blog is as applicable to presenters as it is to writers. Another method to break through the mental barricade is to just start talking.

Writers have long known that speaking aloud what they have written in silence helps them shape their ideas. In a Wired Magazine article on voice recognition, Clive Thompson tells of how sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne and nineteenth-century American writer Henry James wrote by dictating their work to their secretaries. Thompson also cites the modern example of writer and critic Tim Carmody who found himself staring at an empty page, not knowing where to begin. He had no problem talking to friends about his ideas, so Carmody booted up Dragon (voice recognition software from Nuance), talked aloud for hours, and got past the block.

Carmody was experiencing the starting point of a spectrum of benefits that comes from speaking aloud the words they have written. Sometimes it helps with words that others have written. For instance, in researching content for my writing, I often find source material that exists only in print that I cannot copy and paste. In that case, I click on the Dictate function in Microsoft Word and convert the text into a document. During that process, I often find new ways to lead into or out of the passage.

Speaking aloud also provides perspective during the homestretch of the creative process—in the reviewing and polishing steps. Many professional writers read their work aloud as a form of proofreading.

Giving voice to what had been a silent process puts writers in the role of their readers and gives them an objective view of their content. Bestselling author Nicholson Baker calls his version of this process “speak-typing,” in which he dictates to himself and types as he speaks. In an interview with the New York Times about his book House of Holes, Baker explained that the words come out differently. The sentences come out simpler, and there’s less of a temptation to go back and add more foliage. I’m trying for a simpler kind of storytelling.

Speaking aloud is also useful when you are preparing your presentations. At Suasive, we call the process Verbalization. We recommend that presenters rehearse their presentations by displaying their slides in the slide sorter or storyboard view and then Verbalizing the run through of their narrative.

Giving voice to ideas also helps the challenging front end of the creative process. Just as Mr. Carmody did, you can jump-start your own creative process by speaking your presentation aloud and recording it using any voice recording function available to you. Then playback the recording and, based on what you hear, shape or reshape your ideas and words. The key to breaking the logjam is to start talking.

Writer’s block occurs because the prospect of starting from scratch is daunting. Even if a writer has a clear idea of a new story— or a presenter has a clear idea of a new presentation—the prospect of choosing which of all the many available ideas to include or how much detail to provide, overloads the mind. However, writers and presenters alike, having lived with their subject matter, know it intimately and have no difficulty chatting about it. Extend that facility into having a private chat with your recording device. You’ll find the process liberating and productive.

Just as Mr. Montaigne said: “The things I say,” Mr. Montaigne dictated, “are better than those I write.”

This blog is an excerpt from my book Winning Strategies for Power Presentations published by Pearson. Also, check out my newly released Presentation Trilogy—Presenting to Win, The Power Presenter, and In the Line of Fire—available on Amazon and other retailers.

Jerry Weissman is the founder and president of Suasive, Inc., formerly Power Presentations, Ltd. Jerry founded Suasive in 1988 and quickly established himself as the coach for Silicon Valley CEOs delivering critical presentations for their IPO roadshows. He taught them to tell their company stories through the eyes of their investors, and in so doing, significantly increased the valuations of their companies. He amassed an elite client list and soon widened his focus to helping public and privately held companies develop and deliver all types of business presentations.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

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