Focusing presentations

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In Powerful presentations I stepped back. Here I step back even further for a first entry on patterning, pacing, timing, and focusing of presentations.

The Greek spent a lot of time learning effective presentations. Perhaps I can learn something from these ancients?

Rhetoricians identified fixed patterns based on recurrent rhetorical situations and assumptions about how people are persuaded.

In classical rhetoric, “arrangement” means: dividing and ordering according to the needs and demands of situation and genre. The organization of the content of a good presentation had six parts that could be named, and which I am expanding a bit:

1. Introduction.
2. Statement of facts, be they measurables or observables.
3. Discussion of facts for making possible meanings.
4. Proof of facts, the verification and validation ways used.
5. Refutation of possible objections and solving or minimally noting foreseen problems.
6. Conclusion, convergence, uniting of all the above.

Related Articles

• Object-Oriented Rhetoric (bogost.com)
• The Rancor of Rhetoricians (bogost.com)