Britannica and Brainstorming

by Jerry Weissman

 

One of the early lessons we all learn in school is how to make an outline; how to create that waterfall of Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numerals, and lower case letters that cascade down to the bottom of the page, if not dozens of pages of interminable term papers. Thus we are forever programmed to arrange our ideas in a hierarchical order—in sharp contrast to what our brains do naturally: generate ideas in random order.

To demonstrate: as I sit writing this blog, I glance at a ball point pen on my desk. The logo on the pen reminds me that I got it at as souvenir at a business conference. I remember that I met a man at the conference who told me about a book on presidential politics. This reminds me that I had been planning another blog on the same subject, and so I open a file with the notes on that subject and…. you see where this is going. I’m sure that if you were to track your own thought patterns, you would discover the same winding, random path. That’s the way every human mind works: unstructured.

And yet, when business people sit down to develop a presentation, they immediately start to apply structure, in either a hierarchical outline form or by organizing a set of existing PowerPoint slides to create a new “deck”—each approach forces structure onto unstructured ideas.

In a prior post about how Woody Allen creates, you read that he and other artists let their random ideas flow unimpeded, note them as they occur, and then lay out the notes in a panoramic view. Mr. Allen tosses scraps of paper onto his bed, other film directors use storyboards, architects make papier-maché models, military officers use wall size maps, and businesses encourage employees to doodle their creative ideas on whiteboards during product development or strategy sessions. The Wall Street Journal reported that sales of IdeaPaint, a paint product that turns a wall surface into a whiteboard, have doubled since 2008. For your presentation development, you can do your brainstorming on a whiteboard, a computer screen or Post-it Notes as you generate your ideas, but what is as important as the free flow is that you see the ideas you generate in a panoramic or landscape view.

The simple reason for this part of the creative process is that our eyes are set side-by-side in our heads, making the landscape view more pleasing and open than the portrait view. If you start with an outline, the constricted view imposes a ranking sequence too early in the process. A panoramic view allows you to see the conceptual relationships among your ideas.

  Even the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica has come to understand the importance of visual thematic relationships. The publisher of alphabetized—sequential rather than conceptual— reference works for almost 244 years, discontinued its print version in March and went digital. As part of the transition, they included a link map feature, shown above, that looks like a brainstorming session you might do on a whiteboard.

Walter S. Mossberg, the author of the Wall Street Journal’s “Personal Technology” column, reviewed the new feature and wrote that the publisher, which “has always been expensive, and a bit stodgy...[in] order to make itself more relevant in a Wikipedia world…has produced a slick app…Perhaps the coolest feature is the link map, triggered from an icon at the top of each article page. This generates a spider web of icons representing other articles related to the one you were reading.”

The 35,000 foot view shows patterns that lead to clear stories; an outline traps ideas.

Take the high road.   

"Get on with it!"

by Jerry Weissman

Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964 infamously said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” This misguided view of political policy became a major factor in Mr. Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson, but it also serves as a warning lesson for presenters. Extremism in any pursuit can overshoot the mark and result in the opposite intent of the pursuit.

One of the most frequently repeated pieces of advice for presenters is to “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em.” In fact, I offer the same advice in my own coaching practice and writing. The intent is to impose and maintain a clear narrative flow in presentations and speeches; and the reason it is repeated so often is that most presenters and speakers, who regularly crank out long, rambling, pointless patchwork pitches, desperately need reminding. The Triple “Tell ’em” is one solution. However, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing; a sword can cut two ways.

Bruce Eric Kaplan, a cartoonist who appears regularly in the New Yorker magazine as BEK, skewered the excessive Triple “Tell ’em” earlier this month with a panel that showed a presenter in front of an audience, saying, “First, I want to give you an overview of what I will tell you over and over again during the entire presentation.”

We’re also painfully familiar with presenters who impose a narrative laundry list on their bullets by saying “First, I’d like to talk about…” then move on to the second bullet saying, “Next, I’d like to talk about…” and then proceed through every bullet the same way until the end, when they say—wait for it— “Last but not least…”

Some presenters push their extreme handholding even further, by utilizing their slides to do the tracking. As in the figure above, they insert copies of an agenda slide between the sections of their presentation, progressively shifting the highlighted bullet to “Tell ’em what they’re gonna tell ’em” in the upcoming section. This technique can be useful in long tutorial presentations, but if there are only one or two slides between the variations of the agenda in short presentations—and short presentations are obligatory in this 140-character day and age—the audience, feeling patronized, will react with a big Duh!

Presenters are not the only perpetrators of such deliberate continuity devices. Geoff Dyer, who writes the “Reading Life” column the New York Times Book Review section, considers excessive tracking a “basically plodding method.”  In one of his columns, he criticized art historian Michael Fried, whose book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, takes “the style of perpetual announcement of what is about to happen to extremes.” Mr. Dyer said it is “like watching a rolling news program: Coming up on CNN . . . A look ahead to what’s coming up on CNN.”  Concluding his critique, Mr. Dyer wrote, “I kept wondering why an editor had not scribbled ‘get on with it!’ in huge red letters on every page of the manuscript.”

To keep your audience from thinking “Get on with it!” apply the Less is More rule, not just in your slide design but in your content. As you read in the prior posts, “Kill Your Darlings,” and “How Long Should a Presentation Last?”:

• Edit the amount of material you present

• Be brief AND concise

Then, with a shorter and more succinct story, look at your presentation from a 35,000 foot view—as a storyboard—in the Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Sorter view, or with the Power Presentations Storyboard form in the accompanying figure. It’s downloadable from our website: www.powerltd.com by clicking at the bottom of the home page.

Just as television and film directors use storyboarding to see the full scope of their stories, look at your slide show in this panoramic view to see your flow. Then rehearse your presentation aloud, moving from frame to frame. Do this several times. Along the way, you’ll find that you might want to add, delete, or shuffle slides. As you proceed with your iterations, you will develop verbal connective links for your narrative.

Ultimately, you will have a presentation in which The Triple “Tell ’em” is transparently implied. You will have a story that will be easy for you to deliver and, more important, easy for your audience to follow—without a laundry list, without CNN-style teasers, and best of all, without those patronizing agenda slides.

Get on with it!

This post appeared on hbr.org

 

by Jerry Weissman

At first glance, the only Greek in Guy Kawasaki might be the most recent dinner he had at Evvia, the popular Palo Alto restaurant, but after reading his new book, What the Plus! Google+ for the Rest of Us, I’ve decided that he must be a distant relative of Aristotle. The classic Greek philosopher established the ground rules for rhetoric 2300 years ago, and Guy has brought them roaring into the 21^st Century at a gallop.

Aristotle proposed that, to be persuasive, a writer must provide the holy trinity of Ethos, or credibility, Pathos, or benefits, and Logos, or evidence.

• Ethos. Guy, whose new book positions Google+ in the social media space, posts five to ten times a day himself, and so he knows whereof he writes. If that were not enough, he runs Alltop and HolyKaw, two popular social media sites. And of course, his legacy as the Chief Evangelist at Apple Computer gives him the ultimate in credibility; think of it as Cred+.

• Pathos. The book is loaded with helpful advice for anyone who wants to be current and successful in today’s online—social and business—world.

• Logos. The format is studded with illustrative screen shots, tables, and examples. As a crowning touch, Guy kick starts each chapter with a clever but pertinent epigram.

Taken together, What the Plus! provides a clear comparison with Facebook and Twitter, and forms the basis for a valuable manual in the art and science of social media.

Coincidentally, on the day I read Guy’s book, I also decided to sign up for an online music service. I tried one and found it so complex and daunting that I abandoned the effort after two frustrating hours—especially when I was unable to reach customer support. I tried another service, logged in instantly, and then had some questions. They responded to my email query in less than five minutes with full, clear, and authoritative answers.

The experience was a perfect metaphor for Guy’s new book: swift, helpful, and thorough or, as his undoubtedly long-lost ancestor Aristotle would say, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

Follow the Action

By Jerry Weissman

 

oes this large, illuminated letter look familiar? It should. The style has been around ever since medieval times to mark the beginning of a new document. It has continued on into modern publishing where an enlarged first letter marks the beginning of chapters in books and the beginnings of articles in magazines and newspapers. Now it becomes a factor in how we view computer screens.

EyeTrackShop, an eponymous Swedish start-up company, does exactly what its name says: track eye movements to, as their slogan puts it, “identify where people look, for how long and in what order.”  Using webcams to follow and record how viewers perceive images, the company’s technology helps advertisers create effective ads and web designers create effective web pages. By understanding the dynamics of how viewers perceive ads and web pages you can create effective graphics for your presentations.

One of EyeTrackShop’s projects studied how users viewed the homepages of Facebook and Google+. The results, shown in the “Fixation Order” charts below and reported in the Wall Street Journal, found that in both cases, “Users’ eyes head straight for the big status column in the middle of the screen, then over to the list of categories on the left side, then hop across to alerts on the right.”

 

Those movements are driven by forces more powerful than the images on the Google and Facebook sites, two forces that drive the eyes of every human being:

Nurture: In Western culture, because we have learned to read from left to right, our eyes always start reading at the upper left corner of documents

Nature: The optic reflexes in all human eyes impel them to take in new images, and so, having started at the upper left, readers’ eyes naturally—and involuntarily—move to the right. 

As a result, human eyes do essentially what the eyes of the subjects in the EyeTrackShop study did: after centering on the full image, they move to the upper left to start reading, and then sweep across to the right to continue reading. Therefore, whenever you click to a new slide, your audience’s eyes start reading at the upper left of the screen and sweep across to the right.

If your slide is densely packed with images, numbers, and/or text, your audience’s eyes will not see the entire image on the first rightward move; they will have to come back to the left and go back to the right again. The denser the slide, the more times your audience’s eyes will have to traverse the screen, the more traverses they make, the less they will hear of what you are saying.

Do you see where this is going? Back to the familiar Less is More principle, and this new added corollary: Reduce the number of moves your audience’s eyes must make to understand your slide.  

Apply this basic approach to the two most common slides in presentations today: text and bars.

• Avoid wordwrap in text

• Eliminate left axes in bar charts.  

You saw these principles applied in a prior blog, but they’re worth another look:

 

      

 

Feel how your eyes naturally take in each slide: they start at the left and swing to the right.

Do the same for all your presentations. Design effective slides by reducing the number of eye moves your audiences must make.

Minimize the processing their eyes—and their brains—must do. Let them spend their energy and time focused on you.

 

This post also appears on Indezine.com 

* Fixation Order Courtesy of EyeTrackShop, All Rights Reserved.

“I” versus “You”

by Jerry Weissman

 

There’s an old joke about the opera diva who receives an adoring fan in her dressing room after a performance. The diva goes on and on about how magnificently she sang every one of her arias, about her dramatic acting, her expressive gestures, and her fabulous costumes. After about half an hour, the diva says to the fan, “But enough about me, what did you think of my performance?”

Joe Dator, a cartoonist for New Yorker magazine, did a variation on the diva joke. In his sketch, a man is speaking to a woman seated across a table. The caption reads, “Enough about me, but nothing about you just yet.”

This is no laughing matter in most other walks of life where self-centeredness is an obstacle to communication. In presentations, self-centeredness is manifested by a lack of relevance to the audience, and in sales by the lack of benefits for the customer. But to fully understand the negative impact of such one-way communications, let’s take a more universal view by focusing on self-centeredness in conversations, a social phenomenon otherwise known as “Having a ’versation.”

We’ve all been trapped by party bores who emulate the opera diva by delivering monologues all about themselves. One of the early indications that the one-way street is heading for a dead end is the ratio of declarative statements to questions. Bores speak with no question marks on their verbal keyboard.

Another indicator is the ratio of how frequently bores say “I” to how infrequently they say “you.” That simple metric serves as an early warning for you to excuse yourself to head for the bar and refresh your drink. But the role of pronouns in communication extends beyond chit chat into interpersonal relationships.James W. Pennebaker, a University of Texas at Austin psychologist, studies the connections between the frequency of words and feelings. In his book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, he writes:

Pronouns (such as I, you, we, and they)…broadcast the kind of people we are…By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language, we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others.

Mr. Pennebaker conducted a variety of research projects ranging from Craigslist ads to Twitter messages to prove his point. One of the most revealing was a study on speed-dating which, according to a report in the New York Times, “found that couples who used similar levels of personal pronouns, prepositions and even articles were three times as likely to want to date each other compared with those whose language styles didn’t match.”

This post is not meant to help you improve your results at speed-dating, but to urge you to match closely with your listeners, to focus on the “co-” in communications, to have a conversation, not a ‘versation.

When you present, be mindful of your audience by offering them benefits; when you converse, be mindful of the other person by balancing your “I” to “you” ratio. When in doubt, err on the side of the latter.

 

Note: Mr. Pennebaker offers an opportunity to assess your compatibility with a friend by tracking your word usage in this online exercise: secretlifeofpronouns.com/exercise/synch.

 

 

 

 

 

First Things First, Last Things Last

By Jerry Weissman

In a prior post on the art of developing your story, you read that Federico Fellini, the legendary Italian cinema director noted for his imaginative stories, approached the creative process with an open mind; considering any and all ideas fair game for his films. The equivalent of Mr. Fellini’s method in presentations is brainstorming, a step most presenters skip in their rush to prepare their next pitch. Instead, they begin by shuffling existing slides, and often at the last minute. They do this because, as results-driven people, they seek to impose structure at the outset. But every human mind, whether artistic or business, generates ideas randomly, and so an essential part of the creative process—and developing a presentation is a creative process—is to incorporate the randomness. Artists understand this fact of life and go with the free flow.

Woody Allen, a virtual one-man movie studio, having written more than 60 films during his long and illustrious career, is no exception. He revealed his creative process in a biographical documentary on the American Masters series PBS. In a scene shot in his apartment, Mr. Allen reached into a nightstand drawer, took out a large stack of cluttered papers and said, “This is my collection. This is how I start. It’s all kind of scraps and things that are written on hotel things. I’ll ponder these things.” Then, as he tossed the papers onto his bed, he added, “I’ll dump them here like this…I go through this all the time, every time I start a project. And I sit here like this… and I look at one… like that...and then …”

For your brainstorming, as your version of Mr. Allen’s hotel scraps, you can use 3-by-5 index cards, a whiteboard, Post-it Notes or one of the many software products on the market, among them Inspiration, MindManager and Microsoft’s Visio. Whichever vehicle you choose, consider any and all ideas—but be sure that you resist your results-driven instinct to impose structure during your free flow. If you impose structure too soon, you impose censorship, and could lose a fresh idea. Save the structuring for after the brainstorming is done.

Here, too, we find a lesson in the methodology of Woody Allen and Federico Fellini. Each of them is noted for his creativity in post-production, the period after the writing and the shooting, when the director assembles and structures the film. In fact, one of Mr. Fellini’s techniques was to cast actors who looked best for the filming and other actors whose voices sounded best for the sound track and overdubbed them in the post-production.

Let your mind do what it’s going to do during your brainstorming, and do your structuring afterwards. Use the right tool for the right job and in the right sequence.

Follow Woody Allen’s advice, “It’s not rocket science, this is not quantum physics. If you’re the writer of the story, you know what you want your audience to see because you’ve written it. It’s just storytelling and you tell it.”

3 Best Practices from a Top Venture Capitalist

by Jerry Weissman

John Doerr, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is in great demand as a speaker. His repute is attributed to his diverse and successful involvements in for-profit companies (Google, Groupon, Zynga, Amazon), not-for-profit organizations (NewSchools Venture Fund,), and public policy (The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness). Mr. Doerr is often invited to share his experiences, insights, and best practices, and he does so in an unorthodox way: rather than stand and deliver from a canned deck of PowerPoint slides, he asks his audiences what they want to hear and then fulfills their requests. Whenever Mr. Doerr steps up to the front of a room, be it a conference center stage or a university auditorium, he polls his audience for the subjects they’d like him to address. He annotates what they say on a large whiteboard—his version of the classic academic “chalk” talk—then proceeds to discourse on each subject. The nature of the organization or event enables Mr. Doerr to anticipate the key themes he might be asked about. To support his discussion, he brings along a few PowerPoint slides to illustrate the themes, and he accesses the slides as he makes his way through his whiteboard list. In doing so, he provides a role model of three important presentation best practices:

1. Elevate the audience’s primacy. One of the most common faults that salespeople make is to sell features rather than benefits. This fault has its parallel in presenters who focus on their message without regard for the audience (witness the one-size-fits-all “Corporate Pitch”). The results, respectively, are the failure to close the sale or to achieve the goal of the presentation. Mr. Doerr’s approach rights the balance.

2. Relegate the slides to their proper secondary role. Undoubtedly, another common fault is to multi-task the role of slides; presenters use them not only as illustrative graphics, but also as speaker notes, send-aheads, and leave-behinds. As you read in a prior blog, this approach produces images of encyclopedic detail that serve none of the functions. Here, too, Mr. Doerr’s approach rights the balance.

Moreover, in accessing his slides randomly, he employs a useful, but little-known, [entity display="Microsoft" type="organization" subtype="company" active="true" key="microsoft" ticker="MSFT" exchange="NASDAQ"]Microsoft[/entity] PowerPoint technique:

3. The “Go To” Command. When PowerPoint is in Slide Show mode, Mr. Doerr—or you—can go directly to any slide in the deck by entering the slide number (prompted by a printed outline of all the slides) and pressing the “Enter” key. These simple strokes will jump the slide show directly to the desired slide.

This technique has three benefits:

• The presenter appears in complete command and control, sending the subliminal message that the presenter is an effective manager. [entity display="Management" type="section" active="true" key="/management"]Management[/entity] is the primary investment factor.
• Instant gratification for the audience; nice to have for any human being, vital for every audience.
• The “cool” factor.

In his primary role as a venture capitalist, Mr. Doerr sees many presentations from many companies that pitch him to invest many millions of dollars. Surely, he measures what he sees and hears through the filter of his own best practices.

How would you measure up?

This post also appears on Forbes.com 

 

Words that Inspire Confidence

by Jerry Weissman

In response to a prior blog about meaningless words, commenter Brett wrote, “It would be interesting to see those words and phrases that do inspire confidence and trust. That would be a great follow up.” Here you go, Brett (and Aggressive Reader, who seconded Brett’s suggestion). This discussion of meaningful words is primarily about replacements for weak, meaningless ones, while the prior discussion was about the complete elimination of condescending, insulting or self-deprecating ones.

Attorneys have long cautioned officers and employees of corporations to avoid forward-looking statements. The financial scandals of the past decade have made those attorneys even more diligent about language. As a result, corporate presenters now fill their pitches with sentences formed in the conditional mood. Phrases containing “we believe,” “we think,” and “we feel” pervade presentation narratives to such a degree that they spill over into sentences where caution is unnecessary. More to the point, the spillage weakens what should otherwise be assertive language, as in the following sentence:

With this large opportunity and our superior technology, I think you’ll see that our company is well-positioned for growth.

The words “I think” introduce doubt, even if only subliminally, in the minds of your audience. As a presenter attempting to persuade an audience, your job is to provide them with as much certainty as you can. The way to get from doubt to certainty is to switch from the conditional to the declarative mood by eliminating the offending words:

With this large opportunity and our superior technology, you’ll see that our company is well-positioned for growth.

That simple nip and tuck strengthens the impact of the entire sentence.

This is not to say that, when the outcome is uncertain, you should make forward-looking statements or forecasts. That’s risky business. In such cases, you must use the conditional mood, but instead of the weak words “think,” “believe,” and “feel,” try these stronger options:

• We’re confident . . .
• We’re convinced . . .
• We’re optimistic . . .
• We expect . . .

With this large opportunity and our superior technology, you’ll see that our company is well-positioned for growth, and we’re confident that growth will translate into significant revenues.

From the sublime of persuasive words to the banal of airline travel, think of the announcement you typically hear on the public address system when your flight touches down at your destination:

I’d like to be the first to welcome you to San Francisco.

Sound familiar? It’s boilerplate; not just in airline travel, but also in political speeches, college lectures, church sermons, award ceremonies, acceptance speeches, wedding toasts—the list is endless. In business presentations the sentence sounds vague and indefinite. Besides, if you’d like to do it, why not just go ahead and do it?

Welcome to San Francisco

And then there is this often-used phrase:

What we’re not is…

Huh? Well then, what are you? Negative statements fail to provide information. Tell your audiences what you are, not what you are not. Moreover, negative statements sound defensive. Always make positive statements.

As you read in a prior blog, one of history’s most famous negative statements was President Richard Nixon’s infamous defense of himself in the Watergate scandal, “I am not a crook.” Had he framed his statement positively as “I am an honest man,” history might remember him more forgivingly.

Meaningful words stated in the declarative mood, assertively, and positively are more likely to beget meaningful actions.

 

 

(This post appeared on Harvard Business Review Blog)

Leave the Acting to Actors

by Jerry Weissman

Ever since Texas Governor Rick Perry entered the race to become the Republican presidential candidate in the 2012 election, he’s learned the importance of presentation skills—the hard way. Right after he announced his candidacy in mid-August, he soared to a double digit lead in the public opinion polls, ahead of all the previously-announced candidates. But as you read earlier, after a poor showing in a debate among all the candidates in September, and another poor showing in another debate in October, Mr. Perry’s ratings did a double digit drop to fall behind the front runners, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.

The criticism of Mr. Perry’s debate appearances—even from other Republicans—was primarily about his halting delivery and lack of energy. NBC’s Saturday Night Live parodied his behavior in a skit in which actor Alex Baldwin did an impression of Mr. Perry bumbling and yawning.

In response, Mr. Perry shifted gears for the next debate and went after Mitt Romney, his chief opponent, with a vengeance, hurling charges at him with aggressive body language and voice. Mr. Romney responded with equal aggression that devolved into a virtual food fight.

Feeling his oats, Mr. Perry continued the animated delivery style in his media appearances and stump speeches. In one particular speech—to a group of conservative supporters in the key primary state of New Hampshire—he let out all the stops, mugging, giggling, winking, and gesturing broadly. An eight-minute video digest of his performance went viral on the Internet with over a million and a quarter views, followed by countless blogs, tweets, and another parody on Saturday Night Live that attributed his dramatic change to alcohol, drugs, or medications.

The video was perfect fodder for Jon Stewart’s satire. He commented, “Best case scenario, that dude's hammered. Worst case scenario, that is Perry sober and every time we've seen him previously, he's been hammered.” Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post was more balanced, questioning whether Mr. Perry’s speech was “Playful or plain odd.” In my opinion, it was the former. Mr. Perry was not under the influence, but was overcompensating in response to the earlier criticism.

His shift in delivery style was reminiscent of Al Gore’s reversals in his debates with George W. Bush during the 2000 election campaign. In the first of their encounters, Mr. Gore repeatedly expressed disdain for Mr. Bush with frowns, eye rolls, head shakes, and sighs, but this arrogant behavior immediately boomeranged. The television producers had a camera isolated on Mr. Gore for reaction shots, and their directors edited the videotape of his expressions into a rapid-cut sequence. When the news broadcasts ran the sequence, public and professional criticism rained down on the vice president. In response, Mr. Gore made a sharp about face and, in the second debate, came out like a lamb. During the 90 minutes, Mr. Gore expressed agreement with his opponent seven times on major issues. (You can see this “sigh” sequence in my DVD, In the Line of Fire.)

The lesson for Mr. Gore, Mr. Perry, and you is to be natural, be yourself. Don’t try to perform when you present. Instead, consider every presentation a series of person-to-person conversations.

As Mr. Perry said in response to all the ado about the video, “I've probably given 1,000 speeches. There are some that have been probably boring, some that have been animated, some that have been in between.”

Be in between. Be yourself. Leave the acting to actors.

This post also appears on Forbes.com.

Writers Block II

by Jerry Weissman

In a prior post on writer’s block, you read about how to get past the proverbial blank page with a step-by-step process that is as applicable to presenters as it is to writers. But 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 to shape their ideas. In a Wired Magazine article on voice recognition, Clive Thompson tells of 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne and 19th century American writer Henry James, both of whom wrote by dictating their work to their secretaries. Moving to the present, Mr. Thompson cites the 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.”

Mr. Carmody was experiencing the front end of a spectrum of benefits that comes from combining the written words with the spoken. At the back end of the creative process—reviewing and polishing—speaking aloud provides perspective. Many professional writers read their work to themselves (rather than to their secretaries as Messrs. Montaigne and James did.)

Giving sound to what had been a silent process puts writers in the role of their readers. This extra step gives writers an objective view of their content. Bestselling author Nicholson Baker calls his version of the verbalizing process “speak-typing,” in which he dictates to himself and types as he speaks. In an interview with the New York Times about his new book, House of Holes, Mr. 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.”

Presentations are all about speaking aloud, and preparing for them should involve talking too. As a coach, I recommend that presenters rehearse their presentations by displaying their PowerPoint slides in the Slide Sorter view (also known at Storyboard) and then running through their narrative aloud, assuming the role of their audience.

But giving voice to ideas also helps that 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 Dragon software or the voice record function on your smart phone. Play back the recording afterwards to shape or reshape your ideas and words, but the key to breaking the logjam is to start talking. (If this technique sounds familiar, I referenced it in the prior post as a method to eliminate meaningless words. The same approach helps you develop meaningful words)

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 available ideas to include or how much detail to provide, overloads the writer’s 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 conversation in private with your recorder. You’ll find the process liberating and productive.

Mr. Thompson’s article tells us how much Mr. Montaigne valued the process: “‘The things I say,’ Montaigne dictated, ‘are better than those I write.’”

This post also appears on hbr.org