What's the best way to write a presentation? There's this image in popular culture of someone huddled over a computer blank sheet of paper and bawling things up throwing it away, hours and hours, maybe smoking cigarettes. In my experience, that's not the best way to start writing a presentation, the best thing is, sit back, relaxed, have a blank Notepad or a blank computer screen. And just brainstorm on messages that you think will motivate your audience to do the one thing you want them to do. Don't worry about beautiful sentences, sound bites for the ages, things that are going to captivate people yet just focus on ideas, brainstorm on all the ideas and it can just be fragments. Sometimes just a few words, just basic ideas that you want to convey in this presentation.

And the best thing Put it all out there, let it sit for a day or two, let it marinate. let it play around in your brain, then come back to it, put them in priority, and come up with just your top five messages. Then think of an interesting story that fleshes out each one of your messages, a story that involves an actual conversation you had with a client, customer, colleague employee about one of these messages, give yourself a couple of words on a simple outline for that. Next thing, if any other facts, numbers, data points, you really have to have write that down. So when you're all done, your written speech, in most situations should be one page. And it really should be just an outline.

I know that if you're a corporate speech writer, and the boss says, Give me a full written speech, 20 minutes. You can't quite do it that way. But for most people, Most the time if you're not a professional speechwriter for someone else, and you're not a president of a country, or a finance minister where people are analyzing every word, this is the system for writing speeches and presentations. That will help most people most of the time it takes the least amount of time and it gets the best results.