Chapter Ten. Bringing Your Story to Life

Company Example

• Central Point Software

The past few chapters have focused on the visual side of your presentation. Now it’s time to take a big step back and think again about your presentation as a whole, particularly about its verbal side.

Let’s return to the Story Form, which you first saw in Chapter 5 (refer to Figure 5.2). This single form contains the basic building blocks of any presentation story: the Opening Gambit, Point B, the Outline, and the Flow Structures.

The form lays out the overall flow of your presentation story, but because it is at a high level of abstraction, the forest view, it shows only the most salient points. Your presentation comes to life only when you add granularity: the specific verbiage you will use to tell your story.

How do you go from the bare bones presented in the Story Form to a complete presentation? The answer is through a process of preparation and practice called Verbalization.