Need to make a presentation to your client, company or school? Language is key -- but so is body language. These blogs tackle the craft and magic of powerful presentations, from words to gestures to tools (do not fear PowerPoint, just use it wisely):

Power Presentations

Presentation Zen

Create Your Communications Experience

Great Public Speaking

If you've heard them once, you've heard them a thousand times: "Back to the drawing board." "Get our ducks in a row." "Do the heavy lifting." "Think outside the box." We're talking clichés, the banal staples of business meetings, conference calls, speeches, and web content. You're tired of them; I'm tired of them. Yet when push comes to shove, when our feet are to the fire, and--especially--at the end of the day, we keep coming back. Like moths to that bright, hot, flickering thing. It's a losing battle, the fight against clichés. But I'm tanned, rested, and ready; I have my game face on; I came to play; I'm good to go! Clichés, prepare to meet your unmaker.

 Continue reading...

In anticipation of the annual Neiman Conference, a gathering of narrative journalists that took place this past weekend at Harvard University, the newspaper reporter's blog Gangrey ran a month of entries they called "Days to Neiman." In these posts, the authors highlighted writers and books that exemplified the narrative craft. Here are a few of the books:

American Stories by Calvin Trillin

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orleans (see introduction)

The New New Journalism by Robert Boynton

Off Ramp by Hank Steuver (see preface)

Sports Guy by Charlie Pierce (see preface)

The Gay Talese Reader by Gay Talese (see "Origins of a Nonfiction Writer")

The idea for Once Upon a Day came from something that happened to me when I was in New York to tape the CBS Early Show. I was on the way back to my hotel when the cab driver and I struck up a conversation. He was curious why I'd been at CBS, and I told him about my first novel, The Song Reader, which had just been released. He also told me about himself: that he was from Romania and had immigrated a decade before, that he loved New York, that he had two children, a wife, and a house in Queens. But then his voice became quiet as he told me that he was having some problems since 9/11. The World Trade Center attack had changed him, he said, and he didn't know what to do or how to change back. Then he looked in the rearview mirror and said flatly, "I've lost my hope."

 Continue reading...

David Maister, a management guru and author, writes a blog on professional life. In a recent post he discussed presentations and pitches: "When giving a presentation, you can focus on one of three things: your material (we must cover all these slides), yourself (let me impress you), or your audience (let me serve you in some way). Guess which it should be." Want the answer? Read the post here.

With the average American home watching more than eight hours of television a day, it's no wonder how we talk has become eerily similar to how they talk on the tube. Duh! Author Leslie Savan has studied the way popular idioms have crept into our language and -- long story short -- wrote an entertaining and enlightening book on the subject called Slam Dunks and No-Brainers. Just released in paperback, it was recently selected as a "Book for the Teen Age," by the New York Public Library and has been required reading at several universities. In her book, Leslie explains the phenomenon of what she calls "pop language." We phoned Leslie and said, Bring it on!

 Continue reading...

Leslie Savan, the author of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers we interviewed about "pop language," recommends these books on how we communicate:

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English by John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford