Tuft's Tips: (A selected list)

- Have a strong opening

- Humor is good

- PGP: with every subtopic, move from the Particular to the General and back to the Particular.

- Let people know you believe your material. Speak with conviction.

- Practice!

Tufte’s View of PowerPoint's Sins:

– It locks presenters into a linear, slide-by-slide format that discourages free association and creative thinking.

– It imposes artificial and potentially misleading hierarchies on information.

– It breaks information and data into fragments, making it more difficult to see the logical relationships between different sets of data.

– It encourages over-simplification by asking presenters to summarize key concepts in as few words as possible – e.g., bullet points – which can lead to gross generalizations, imprecise logic, superficial reasoning and, quite often, misleading conclusions.

– It imposes an authoritarian presenter/audience relationship rather than facilitating a give-and-take exchange of ideas and information.

– It encourages what Tufte calls "chartjunk" and "PowerPointPhluff" – i.e., uninformative or gratuitous graphics.

– And, above all, PowerPoint makes the people who use it look stupid.