Graphic designers and photographers rely on a lot more than raw talent to compose their work. They make use of the rule of thirds. Actually it isn’t really a rule. It’s a guideline based on the idea that compositions are most pleasing to the human eye when the main elements fall on or near the four crossing points of a nine box grid.
The only tool you need to apply the rule is a grid. You can make one in PowerPoint or Keynote by arranging lines and circles until you have nine rectangles on a slide. As digital photo expert Lesa King says, divide your slide up so that it resembles a tic–tac-toe board. My slides look a lot better since I discovered the rule. Now, whenever I begin working on a new presentation, I include a grid slide.



When I want to apply the rule, I simply copy the grid onto the slide I’m working on. Then, I arrange graphic and text elements until I’m happy with the composition. See the example below, which is a slide I use in my presentation writing workshops and seminars to illustrate the discussion about the importance of asking good questions when interviewing subject matter experts.




Once I’m happy with my arrangement, I delete the grid and le voilà, another pièce de résistance!





Wendy Cherwinski
words@echeloncomm.ca

Tags: Tips

Nothing drains the life out of a presentation faster than a steady stream of slides filled to overflowing with text. At the very least the slides are boring to look at. But presenters often make things worse by talking over them, ignoring the fact that audiences can’t read and listen at the same time.

The solution is to design slides that are so simple people can absorb them quickly and return to listening to the presenter. After all, the presenter should be the focus of attention. What he or she has to say is the point of the presentation. The visuals are merely meant to serve as illustrations.

Nancy Duarte, whose company created the presentation slides that Al Gore used in his film An Inconvenient Truth, says that good slide design should follow the principles reflected in billboard ads. Take a look next time you drive along the highway and notice how billboards display a combination of bold graphics and simple text. It doesn’t take much time or effort to get the message as you zoom by.

A common complaint among presentation writers is that they lack the skills and resources needed to produce great slides. Granted, there are limits to what you can achieve when time is tight, your graphic library is small and your artistic talent is even smaller. But chances are, no matter what the constraints, you can do better than making audiences read static text.

Technology certainly can help. The latest version of PowerPoint (2007 for Windows, 2008 for Mac) includes a small but versatile collection of high quality stock photos. A cropping function and other formatting tools add even more variety. Take the flip chart photo for example. It’s easy to pop it onto a slide, resize it and then use it to frame bullets. It sure makes the text more interesting to look at.

PowerPoint for Mac 08 also allows users to access their personal photo collection. And it automatically sizes the images to fit the slide layout. So, if you are handy with a camera, you can always import your own pictures into your slides. Just be careful when you capture images of people. If they can be easily identified, you should get permission to use the shots.

Avoid the overused clip art that PowerPoint provides – or cheap clip art from any source, for that matter. It simply does not send a business-like message to the audience.

While I was strolling through an art gallery in Washington DC awhile back, I overheard a tour guide explaining a technique favoured by the Dutch masters. She said they would paint the subject (the scene of ships in a harbour for instance) in the bottom third of the canvas. Then they would fill the upper two thirds with sky and clouds. That approach gave me an idea for making text slides more interesting. I now look for graphics that I can use to frame the bottom of my slides to ‘set the mood’ for my message. For example, I often use a graphic of empty auditorium seats to frame the slides I use when I talk about how to bring the audience into a presentation.

These examples illustrate the ideas described in this article.






Wendy Cherwinski
words@echeloncomm.ca

Tags: Tips

The desert sun blazes down as I stand in a pen transfixed by a horse running circles around me.

She stops and starts and changes direction on my command, which I reinforce with the flick of a switch.

After five minutes or so, the pace changes. I turn my back and slowly walk away. Calmly, the horse moves toward me, signaling that she is ready to accept me as her leader.

I’m thrilled. With hardly a word from me we have had quite the conversation.

The young mare is acting on instinct, making decisions that have allowed her species to survive for thousands of years. I’m sharpening my communications skills. And while I have only moved a few steps in a tight little circle, it feels like I have worked just as hard as my equine friend.

Learning to take charge of a horse is one of many new experiences I will encounter as a student of Dialogue in the Desert. Dialogue, as veterans call it for short, is a strategic communications thinking and planning workshop designed to give participants the views and tools they need to be influential and persuasive in the workplace. It’s the first of its kind and the longest running in its field.



Joe Williams, an organizational communicator based in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, created Dialogue after he went looking for a strategy course for communicators and came up empty. For the past 30 years, he has filled the vacuum, holding his workshops at a guest ranch deep in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. So far he has delivered Dialogue more than 100 times to students who come from all over North America and more distant places such as Bermuda and Australia.

Over five days, Dialoguers divide their time between a classroom where Joe leads fast-paced lessons and discussions, and the ranch and the desert beyond where they put theory into practice. The Dialogue attracts career communicators as well as people from other walks of life who want to learn how to be more strategic in their communications. Each student starts applying Joe’s lessons and tools to their own issues on the spot.

I have come looking for ways to be a more effective speech and presentation advisor, workshop leader and entrepreneur. I want to know answers to questions such as: How can I communicate better with my clients? How can I better help them achieve their goals through the material I craft for them? How can I help them really connect with and influence their audiences? And how can I better use communication to create more success in my own business?

Joe provides plenty of answers and so do my workshop colleagues. It’s a small group, seven in all. When Joe asks us to pick a name, we choose a western theme and declare ourselves the Magnificent Seven. During classroom lessons and hands on sessions, shared meals, trail rides, desert walks, team penning exercises, roping lessons and a few trips to the ranch bar, we learn together and from each other, enjoying lots of laughs along the way.



Yet, my most memorable lesson comes from the horse in the ring. Words on their own are not enough I learn. That’s a tough message for a speechwriter. To get a positive response from the horse my body language has to be one with what I say. In other words, my intention has to be plain, undeniable and reflected in every aspect of my communication. If not, nothing happens. That horse knows when someone is just talking the walk, just as human audiences do.

I also do some soul searching as I create a poster-sized map that shows where I am now in my business, the point I want to reach in the future, and what steps I have to take to reach my goal. Months later, the map remains a treasured memento of the Dialogue and a still relevant touchstone. Moreover, it lets me see where I’m making progress and where my efforts are stalled. One of my fellow Dialoguers took her map home and pinned it to the outside of her office door. Be warned all who enter here it seemed to say; things are going to change.

Joe fell in love with the Arizona desert as a kid. On summer vacations, he used to help his granddad work a hobby mine claim amid the jumping cholla and towering saguaro cactus. When he planned his first workshop as a company retreat, heading back to the desert seemed like a good idea. It would take participants out of their comfort zone and plunk them down in an alien environment where everything seems to slither, stick or sting. Students still arrive perplexed by the instructions to pack a comb or pocketknife and carry it everywhere during their stay. They soon find out why: some of them, the hard way.

By the early eighties, Dialogue was a regular event as Joe filled the growing need for a workshop that explored strategy from a communications point of view. In the years since, it has moved three times: always to a ranch in Arizona. Today it’s held at the White Stallion, a family-run operation just outside of Tucson. The White Stallion has occasionally doubled as a movie set. We eat lunch one day in an isolated ramada where George Clooney once shot some scenes. When I return home I rent the movie (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). Sure enough, the lopsided saguaro in the frame with George is in some of my pictures too.



Joe defines strategy as a focus on results or direction. Strategy, he says, answers the question: What are we doing, or going to do? What direction are we going in as an organization and why? It’s the big picture view or what he calls ‘the what’. Planning, on the other hand, answers the question how: how are we going to execute the strategy?

He likes to use Wal-Mart as an example. Wal-Mart’s strategy is to sell goods for less than consumers pay elsewhere. The plan behind the strategy involves buying inventory in volume. I extrapolate his example to my own situation. My strategy, I decide, is to help people excel through speeches and presentations. The challenge now is to come up with a plan to turn strategy into action. I use the tools I learn at Dialogue to hone my focus.

Thinking about strategy is an exercise in cutting through the clutter says Joe. Once again, the desert illustrates his point. Everything living in it is focused on a single task: survival.

Strategy is critical, but Joe stresses that it’s useless without a plan. The opposite scenario is also true. A plan without a strategy is equally adrift. There’s no sense picking a destination unless you’re prepared to row hard to get there, he says. Just like there’s no sense rowing hard until you have a destination in mind.

Dialogue takes place over five days; long enough to get used to the still, stark desert. The alien landscape helps Dialoguers to step out of their usual thinking and recharge. Many leave with a heightened sense of purpose.



Joe says the quiet of the desert also aids reflection. That’s why he issues journals to students and asks them to keep notes. He helps them get in the mood by punctuating forays into the desert with spiritual readings.

There are grumbles when Joe announces his plan for day two of the workshop. We are expected to get up before dawn and trek into the desert to watch the sun come over the mountains. Joe wants us to see the big picture in a different light. (My pun.) He reminds us that it’s easy to get bogged down in the details of being a doer or a creator of stuff and to lose sight of a larger role we can play; that of advisor. Too often, he says, people are tactical when they should be strategic. And then they wonder why no one invites them to contribute to decisions about the way ahead.

In Joe parlance, putting your head up to scan the horizon is going wide and shallow. But there are also times to go narrow and deep – to focus on a specific issue and ask lots of questions that start with a word Joe imbues with great significance. The word is why. We respond to that word a lot as the Magnificent Seven work together in the classroom to build a strategy map. Although we come from radically different workplaces and backgrounds, the map has relevance to us all. In human affairs, communications is king – no doubt.

Activities outside the classroom not only demonstrate communication principles; they build confidence. If I can take control of a horse within a few minutes, I reason, I can walk into a room with senior executives and make a presentation. Chances are none of the suits are going to jump out of their seats and kick me.



I also learn to throw a lariat – although not from horseback. But I do spend time in the saddle learning to cut cattle and move them into a small enclosure. My horse has lots of experience in team penning and he shows it, ignoring my signals in order to do what he knows has to be done. Another valuable lesson from the Dialogue: humility.

Despite the best of intentions, it’s easy to go home and slip back into old ways. The real test of Dialogue comes six months later when I sit down to think hard about what I took away from the experience. Were Joe’s learning points really relevant to my role as a speech and presentation writer? Do I remember the tools and insights and am I applying them? Am I more strategic now than before?



By and large, the answer to each question is the same: yes. But it helps to refer back to my notes and journal entries. I’m also glad to know that the other members of the Magnificent Seven are a mere e-mail message or phone call away.

Let me share a few of the things I learned that would benefit any speechwriter:

• Aim to be a strategist and not just a craftsperson. Being strategic involves knowing your organization, knowing the market or environment it operates in.

• Communications is a transfer of energy. Today I work harder than ever at making the speeches I write clear, compelling and dynamic. Dull policy speak and easy clichés will not make the grade. Every draft has to pass a critical test: Are the speaker’s thoughts and words pointed and powerful enough to transfer energy to the audience?

• Analysis/paralysis is a pitfall of strategy building. To avoid it start with a clear purpose and use it as a compass to lead you to the research you need to do. I tell my speechwriting students if you are clear on your speaker’s goal in making the speech then you will know when you have gathered enough of the right stuff to start writing drafts.

• Don’t make assumptions too quickly and constantly question those you already hold. This lesson takes a great deal of awareness and self-discipline to execute. As Joe says, to build a strategy you have to show the courage of a revolutionary and start with a clean slate. Do research, rather than basing ideas and decisions on what you think is gospel. It’s easy to fall into a pattern of same old, same old. Speechwriters do it when they make a habit of copying material from one speech and pasting it into another. The eventual result is is a muddled patchwork of stale ideas and messages. Every once in a while start from scratch. You might even begin anew by rewriting your Q&As on a topic. Rethink and reword them in light of what’s happening now. And then transfer that energy into your speeches.

• Structure determines results. This lesson can be applied on many different levels. At a high altitude, it means learning to think of yourself as far more than a speechwriter. Say, you work for a large chemical company. A big part of your job should be to learn about the chemical industry and your company’s place in it. In other words, structure your thinking so that you’re a specialist in the business first, and a communicator second. On a day-to-day plane, structure means ensuring your work reflects a strategic outlook. Tackle assignments with a goal in mind, spend time planning, not just doing, and find ways to measure your results. If you want others to see you as strategic, act strategic.

At the end of every Dialogue session Joe holds a circle ceremony. The centerpiece of the circle is a simple eagle feather. Each participant is invited to speak about their Dialogue experience as they hold the feather. The moment draws out touching insights and, in some cases, strong emotions.

In a sense, those of us who write speeches and presentations hold the eagle feather in proxy for our clients. We have a responsibility then to honour them, and their audiences, by producing work with the clarity and strength of purpose of the desert sun coming over the mountains.

Wendy Cherwinski
words@echeloncomm.ca

Tags: Commentary

On a recent car trip I listened to the audio version of Malcolm Gladwell’s newish book Blink and emerged at my destination with a few of leg cramps – and a broader vocabulary. Gladwell is the writer who caused a sensation with his first book, The Tipping Point. Now he has enriched our lexicon with the term thin-slicing.

Gladwell says that people who have perfected the art of thin-slicing have developed the ability to filter “the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.” Or as a scientist might put out, they are skilled at receiving the signal and filtering out the noise.

In Blink, Gladwell explains how this phenomenon works – leading to both good and bad results. For example, he describes the scene that unfolded when several independent art experts instantly detected a fake sculpture despite the fact that staff at a major museum had examined it thoroughly and pronounced it the real McCoy. And he explains why Warren Harding, a man of limited abilities, was able to rise to the level of U.S. President. Gladwell also shares a quote about Harding that is sure to amuse any speechwriter. Harding’s speeches, he says, were once described “as an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.”

But, back to the idea of thin slicing. In a very real sense, that term describes an important part of your job as a speech or presentation writer. It’s up to you to get to the heart of the matter and explain why and how it has a bearing on the issue or problem at hand.

Overload listeners with detail and extraneous information and they will become bored and zone out. Carefully craft only the most salient facts and arguments and you will keep them engaged. The difference is in how you ‘slice’ it.

For more news and insights of interest to speech and presentation writers, read Podium, a free monthly e-newsletter. To subscribe, contact Wendy at words@echeloncomm.ca

Tags: Commentary

You can’t always tell a book by a cover – or by it’s title for that matter. And that explains why Jacked Up is such a surprise. It’s actually a book about speeches and presentations. But rather than providing a step-by-step guide, its advice runs along the lines of how not to step in it.

The subtitle explains author Bill Lane’s motivation for writing his tome. Jacked Up is The Inside Story about How Jack Welch Talked GE into Becoming the World’s Greatest Company. Lane wrote it to capitalize on his experience working closely with the larger-than-life Welch. For 20 years while Welch ran GE, Lane ran the uber-CEO’s executive communications.

As Lane explains, Welch placed a lot of stock on presentations as a means of communicating culture and learning within GE. He also demanded complete candor. He could not abide showy, report-style presentations that played up successes and played down or ignored challenges and setbacks.
Internally, he encouraged presenters to share lessons learned and to talk about disappointments and things they wished they had done or would do “next time”. He wanted employees to take away solid, practical information that they could apply in their jobs.

Lane also says Jack Welch was a great speaker and he demanded that his lieutenants be good on the podium as well. Welch put hours of preparation into every speaking engagement; especially those he gave to the investment community. And that effort paid off handsomely. Year after year, Welch’s presentations got attention on the same scale as Warren Buffett’s annual message to shareholders.

Jacked Up gives readers a sense of the competitiveness and camaraderie that existed at GE under Jack Welch. The book also flashes back to Lane’s experiences as a soldier who saw combat in Vietnam. While the bullets didn’t fly around his head at GE Headquarters, one gets the sense that his battle-tested survival skills came in handy.

Jacked Up: The Inside Story about How Jack Welch Talked GE into Becoming the World’s Greatest Company, Bill Lane, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2007.

Wendy Cherwinski
words@echeloncomm.ca

Tags: Commentary

Are we continuing the shift that started with radio and television to becoming a more oral communication-based society? That may be the case as we increase our use of technology to access intellectual content. Take for example the great speeches of the last century. Until recently, they were largely locked in history books. Today, many of them are available in either audio or visual form on the Internet. And improved accessibility is spawning a new pastime – watching and listening to the most influential speeches and presentations of the recent past.

A good source of recorded presentations is TED.com. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together top thinkers in its three areas of focus. Today, TED puts the best of its talks and performances on the Internet, for free. So, events that were once open only to the elite who could afford the price of admission are now available to all. I’m a TED fan, and I have plenty of company – all around the world. I’m sure the spirit of Marshall McLuhan is smiling as the TED-o-philes gather around the communal fire.

I also visit CPAC – the Canadian cable channel that focuses on covering politics and political affairs. My favourite CPAC destination is Podium (great choice of name) where recorded speeches and presentations are archived. Would I subscribe to a service that provided transcripts of these events? Maybe, because I’m a self-avowed ‘speech geek’. But I don’t think reading them would be as much fun as watching them is.

Leafing through the Ottawa Citizen this morning, I stumbled on an interview with Stephen Beckta. The urbane Becta made a splash in the New York restaurant scene and then returned to his hometown to open a successful eatery. What was on his iPod the interviewer asked? Well, the type of music you might expect an under-40 year old to listen to – along with famous political speeches. “I have so many political speeches on there. I just love listening to them,” he explained.

Enough evidence to rest my case that technology is allowing us to shift further away from print towards oral communication? Maybe…maybe not. Observation to continue.

Wendy Cherwinski
words@echeloncomm.ca

Tags: Commentary