DIY: Making Meaning Your Way

Making Meaning through your creative work takes courage.
It’s an intensely private work, which in our culture is always slightly suspect. When you see the serial killer being led away from the crime scene, you always hear, “He kept to himself,” or “He was a loner,” as if those things are somehow intrinsically bad and wrong. Yet that’s where a lot of creative work is done–by yourself. Alone.

One person's chicken is another's Little Red Hen

Making Meaning starts from scratch.
Sure, you may have played with kits. And you may well be using many leftovers from various kits to make your own stuff. But you are working with your idea. You aren’t assembling anything, and you aren’t using directions supplied with a kit. You are moving into uncharted territory, and you are alone. And you love it.

Making Meaning means you write the rules.
The way you make meaning is your way. Not your neighbor’s, not the rich and successful writer, musician, dancer, or gardener you admire. You get to fail, try again, and then succeed. And that trip is what makes it so very satisfying. Because it involves creative play, messing up, and fixing it all by yourself. Making meaning brings satisfaction because it involves triumph over obstacles. The major obstacle is often your own thinking.

Making Meaning is not a consumer activity.
You can buy a kit and make something, but it doesn’t make meaning. You can buy paint-by-numbers, scrapbooking kits and cards, you can complete step-by-step wire-wrapping jewelry and wind up with a product without one scrap of meaning making. You may feel empty after such an activity, even if you have completed a gift-quality product.

Making Meaning is a Little Red Hen project.
You remember the story of the Little Red Hen. Her friends–the cat, dog, mouse, chick (it varies from story to story) don’t help her plant the wheat, cut the wheat, take it to the mill, or bake the bread. But they all show up to eat the bread. And after all that work, she doesn’t share the bread. She eats it by herself. Is she selfish? No, in this story the other animals aren’t starving, they are hoping to share in her success without having done the work. The Little Red Hen has made meaning in the bread and is eating the joy of her work.

Making Meaning is a goal in itself.
You’ve written a book? That made meaning. Publishing it is another story. The joy you feel in writing is the success. Publishing is an administrative task that will make you feel proud, inadequate, fill you with “shoulds” and bring out detractors, admirers, and hangers-on. That’s a step beyond making meaning. Making meaning is a journey.   It can have many goals that don’t make meaning. Make sure you notice when meaning-making stops, you don’t want to confuse the journey with reaching a destination.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She has a website for writers who want to keep an art journal, and a website for her business training. Both have coaching sections.

Publishing Your Book: The Book Proposal, Part II

Yesterday, I wrote about getting started writing a book. People have been telling me how “lucky” I am to have a book under consideration, and I thought it would be great to help others do it the same way I did it–step by step. Because it isn’t luck. It’s a lot of hard work. And it’s worth it.

There is a giant truth about writing a book–and it’s good to know before you start. You do not write a book to publish it. You write a book to write well. To say something you wanted to say. If you write a book mainly to get published, you’ll be disappointed no matter what happens.

Book drop

Today, we’re talking about the book proposal and choosing a publisher. At this point, you have a non-fiction book outline–it’s pretty detailed, you could write it by following the outline. You also have 12-24 illustrations to show your point.

1. Write a few chapters. You don’t have to start at Chapter One, but you have to be clear on what you are writing and how it fits into the whole. Finish them, file them, forget them for a week or so. Open the file, read it. Is it still interesting? Does the sequencing seem right?  Does it make you want to write more? Is the grammar right? Show it to someone you know well enough to ask a favor of, but not so well that they will lie to you to keep your friendship. Ask them to follow the steps, see it they get the result you meant.

2. Go to a bookstore to check out similar books. Sure, you can do this online, but you need to get out of the office. Look for books that are similar to yours in content or intent. Is this a how-to? A step-by-step project book? A book for inspiration?  Is it paper arts? Mixed media? It can be more than one thing. Look at the books to see how the chapters are arranged, to see how you react to the material. And then see who published them. Take notes.

3. Look at the list of publishers. Publishers have niches. Your book should fit into their niche. You don’t want to be the author who writes, “When you read my book proposal, you will certainly want to add non-fiction to your publishing goals.” Now check out all the publishers on your list. What do they publish? Cross out all the publishers who specialize in categories your book doesn’t fit into– textbooks, coffee table books, fiction. Cross off all the publishers who want you to write about their ideas for pay. You might want to do that, but you already have a book.

4. Read their website carefully. Most publishers have submissions guidelines somewhere on the website. Don’t submit anything until you find it, read it, and understand it. Then follow it. Publishing companies receive hundreds of proposals. The first way they sort is by people who follow directions. If they take your book, you will have to follow a lot of directions with an editor. Publishers do not willingly buy trouble. Even if you are charming and special.

5. Follow the directions. If they say submissions through agents only, you will need to find an agent. That’s another step. In general, non-fiction writers don’t need agents for their first book. If the guidelines say no submissions through email, follow the instructions. Buy an envelope big enough to return your proposal, and one to hold all the material. Put enough postage on the return envelope to send it back first class.  Make a checklist of all the pieces, there may be several.

6. Write professionally about yourself. You will be asked for a biography, reasons you can write this book better than others, the outline, the illustrations, and some other questions. It is excruciating to write about yourself. Do not include everything you’ve ever done. Don’t write your bio as a poem (particularly if the publisher doesn’t publish poetry). You may need help with this part from a friend who is also a good writer. Oddly enough, a simple, straightforward approach works best.

7. Find a name. Sending your proposal to a person is better than sending it to “submissions.” This is the time to use your social network. Ask if anyone in your network knows a contact. People know people, and this is the time to ask. Phone the publisher and see if you can speak to a real person. It’s not impossible, but you may have to be inventive to get through the menus.

8. An acquisitions editor looks for good ideas to pitch. She or he may read your outline and make suggestions for changes. This is not the time to brush off any ideas but your own. This is not the time to prove that every word you write is golden and untouchable. This is the time to be a good listener. If the suggestion makes sense, offer to make the changes. If you don’t know how the editor’s idea fits with your project, ask. Your decisions make a big difference at this step.

9. Be polite and open to suggestions. The nicest treatment you are going to get is during the back and forth process. Be polite, prompt, and friendly. If you think the ideas won’t work for the book, say so. Be prepared that the editor knows what will work for the audience. If your book won’t, better to know early.

10. Be prepared to wait. Even if an acquisitions editor likes your work, you’ll have to wait. Wait for a proposal meeting, in which the acquisitions editor pitches her book. Each publisher has a different schedule. You could wait a week, a month, a quarter. It’s fair to ask how long the wait is, it’s not fair to email-stalk the acquisitions editor.

11. As soon as the wait begins, keep busy. See if you need to do more research. Prepare more illustrations. Think about the next book idea. Do NOT think about what you should have done differently. Now is the time to keep looking ahead, not back.

Be prepared for people to tell you how “lucky” you are–as if the book that’s been six years in the writing took a month or so. If you haven’t talked about your book a lot–a good idea to keep your ideas focused–people don’t know how long you have been working at it. Almost all “overnight success” stories have a five-year start-up. But it’s fair to tell people that luck had nothing to do with it. It takes a lot of work to write a book, and it’s fine to say so.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She has a website for writers who want to keep an art journal, and a website for her business training. Both have coaching sections.

Publishing Your Book: Step-by-Step to Getting “Lucky”, Part I

Right after I celebrated having an acquisitions editor express interest in my book, friends started congratulating me in sort of an odd way.

“You are SO lucky to be able to write a book and get interest right away.”

From school.discoveryeducation: http://tinyurl.com/yzjs7z9

“Aren’t you lucky to get interest in your first book so fast!”

“I could write a book too, but I don’t have time.”

“I’ve written a book, but it’s not ready to go out yet.”

“Ive been working on my book for years. I’m just not as lucky as you.”

You, too, can do exactly what I did, and I’m going to tell you how I did it, step by step. No secrets. No holding back. First, truth in disclosure: I do not yet have a contract. I had an acquisitions editor express interest. There is still the giant leap to acceptance. More about that part later. First, the step by step.

1. Write every day for 50 years. I wrote my first book when I was seven years old, in a spiral notebook. (It didn’t get published.) I’ve been writing almost every day since.

2. Take on different writing assignments. I wrote my first published book when I was 30. It was a “book for hire” deal. I hated it. It wasn’t my idea, it was me writing about someone else’s idea for pay. Since that time, I’ve written for ad agencies, PR firms, financial institutions, insurance companies, huge manufacturing companies, small struggling businesses. I’ve worked at a newspaper, at a magazine, at an editorial think tank. I’ve written for people I agreed with and people I despised. On topics I loved and topics so boring, watching the barometer drop was more interesting. But I wrote. Now, fast-forward to this book.

3.  Find a topic that fascinates, mesmerizes and fires you up. Mine was One Sentence Journaling. (Here’s an article I wrote about it last March.) I have notes that go back six years, but I organized and taught the course four years ago. Each time I taught it, I took notes, listened to comments and changed the course to see if it improved.

4. Do the same thing with two more topics: find topic you really like, develop a course, teach it, listen to feedback, change parts of it until you feel it is a good course that people will pay to attend. (This helps you gauge interest in the material.)

5. Once you’ve taught it in person, teach it online, to make sure you have written exercises that are clear and make sense. Teaching a class online takes about 8 x the length of time it takes to teach the class in prep, set-up, running and comments.

6. Examine the classes and discover a new path to the same information. This is called discovering another perspective. Not everyone learns the same way. You are broadening your audience. As you teach other classes, see what people wish they could develop their creativity to do, what they are missing in their lives, how they can make meaning. Take lots of notes. Be willing to be confused and not know what to do next.

7. Stay open to new ideas. Mine  hit me during morning walking meditation. It was a good idea but it doesn’t hang together with the rest of the material. Be willing to spend months trying out ideas, messing up, failing, starting over, trying, polishing, until one day you are too exhausted to care anymore. You put the idea aside. The next day, in the shower, you have an idea. It fits! You work another three months fitting it into the writing portion.

8. Blend the new ideas and put them in front of your audience. In my case, that was the beginning of raw-art journaling.   Blend the new approach with the old, turning it into the same step, so people who learned visually, auditorially (by hearing), and kinesthetically (by moving),  could learn.  Create a ton of examples. Create a website. Listen to comments from people who like and don’t like your website. Think them through. Be willing to be wrong, to fail again.

9. Develop a class that combines the final version of your idea. Teach this class and all the variations 10 times, each time making changes that improve the class. Listen to feedback, criticism, questions, and people who tell you it’s weird. Ignore the last one. Note on teaching: It will not make you rich. Do not teach to make money. Teach to try out your ideas, to spread your discoveries, to get better teaching. Teaching is not about you, it’s about the participants.

10. Gather up all your notes and create an outline for a book. Do this while running your own business, because no one pays you for this stage. Work on the outline until it looks like information people would pay to play with.

You now have reached the stage where you can write a book proposal. At this point, I’ve spend 50 years writing almost every day, and six years in some stage of book development. I haven’t started writing the book yet, although every shred of it has been taught and evaluated.

Tomorrow: How to write  a book proposal and find a publisher.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She has a website for writers who want to keep an art journal, and a website for her business training. Both have coaching sections.

 

To-Do Lists that Help You Work

To-do lists can work for you or make you crazy. There are many ways to create them, and the only one that works is the one that works for you.

First, I have to admit that I use a paper to-do list. Even with all the electronics, the fastest, most efficient list-making for me is done with a pencil and index. card.  I don’t have to boot it up, recharge it, or open it. It’s available to me at all times, and a pencil doesn’t need to be connected, opened, or tested. It’s always ready to go. I’ll admit I have a pencil thing.

Here are two ways to use a to-do list. Both involve 3 x 5 index cards, or 4 x 6 cards if you write big.  (I turn the cards and work on them portrait-orientation.) I work on several projects at a time, so I use one card per project. Each project’s name is written on the top of the card, and the to-do list underneath. That way, I can put all the project to-do lists next to each other and see how much work I have and which project needs to take priority. When I have a lot of projects going at the same time, it’s wonderful.

When I get really into projects, I assign one color to each project, and color code the cards to match the project. (You can also use different color cards.) Color coding gives me overviews and helps me draw conclusions faster. (“A lot of blue cards, do I need to farm some of this out?” “The yellow project is due in a week. Why so few yellow cards? Am I done early, or is there something missing?”)

Then there is the worry list to-do list. When I wake up at night, unable to sleep and busy worrying, I make a list of things I’m worrying about. Having written down the worries, I go back to sleep. The next morning, I tackle the things that need to be done.

The last to-do list is called the tag-cloud to-do list. Because I use the same method as tag clouds–the more important a task, the bigger I write it. Because I have small handwriting, I draw a box around each item on the list. The bigger the box, the more important (or worrisome, or pressing) the item. That gives me two facts at once: the item and the importance, all in one glance.

You can use a mix of these methods. Color-coding works with tag-clouding very well.  Tag-clouding works with worry-list well, too. And no matter what method I choose, writing down all the things that need to get done helps me free up more memory cells.

Image: www.ontimesupplies.com

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and a trainer specializing in communicating. That includes Writing for the Web and Giving Powerful Presentations. See all the topics at QuinnCreative.com © 2007 -9 All rights reserved.

How Heavy is That Paper? Pounds v. GSM

If you choose paper for your brochure or  your art print,  you have seen the weight of the paper stock printed in three ways–in pounds (60-lb. or 60#),  grams per square meter (g/m² or gsm), or points (pts).  There seems to be a big difference. There is. Even if you don’t love the metric system, you’ll find the gsm method more reliable.

Ream of paper from ecosalon.com

For years, I could feel a piece of paper and know with great certainty its weight in pounds, if it was cover or text stock, and with some certainty, the manufacturer. Well, not every paper, but I could tell cover and text stock and the manufacturing mill for about 30 different mills. It was my job in those days.  I had more trouble if the weight was card stock, which is given in points. When the gsm method first came up, it seemed to be random–that it didn’t match with the pounds weights from paper to paper. I started losing bar bets. Here’s the difference, in simple words.

Pounds measure weight, no matter what the size. The pound weight of paper is set by the weight (in pounds) of a ream of paper–500 sheets. It doesn’t matter how big the paper is– cover stock is cut from a “standard” size sheet that measures 20″ x 26.” Text stock is cut from a “standard” size sheet  that 25″ x 38″–considerably bigger. But a ream of 500 sheets, regardless of size, is put on a scale and

Strathmore drawing paper: 24 sheets, 80-lb or 130 gsm.

weighed.  That measurement is accurate, but very variable.

Points measure height, no matter what the size. The point size is a bit more reliable.  It measures the height of a ream of paper. A 10-pt card stock means a ream of paper (500 sheets)  measures 10 inches. In this case, the flat size of the sheet doesn’t matter.

To get a feel for the difference: Most business cards are 10-pt or 15-pt stock, the post office’s minimum measurement for a post card is 7-point stock. A point is 0.007″ or one-one-thousandths of an inch.  This is a better measurement for comparison, but it still doesn’t sort out heavy-bulk differences for paper that’s been compressed more.

Gsm measures the weight of a standard size paper.  Gsm is the reliable because it is standard across all papers. It measure the weight of a square meter of paper. That sets the size as the constant, and allows the weight to vary by heaviness of paper stock.  A square meter of  a light stock might be 90 gsm, and a square meter of heavier stock might be 140 gsm. In each case, the size is the same–a square meter.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach who trains people how to communicate clearly.

“The Power of Slow” –Interview with the Author

Christine Louise Hohlbaum is a recovering speedaholic who recognized the power of slow while one day eating ice cream with her then three-year-old daughter. Life is in the details. Don’t let it whiz by.

Christine’s new book, The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World is being released this week. She was kind enough to make time in her schedule for an interview. This is a heavily edited version, you can read the entire interview on my website, Raw-Art-Journals.com

Christine Hohlbaum, author, mom, and expat.

Quinn: You are the mother of two school-age kids. “Slow” is not something I associate with busy moms. What made you decide to write the book?

Christine: Ironically, I dedicated my book to my two kids because they were my first teachers in slow. It is no secret that life changes when children arrive on the scene. They taught me that life can go at a slower pace and still be equally effective and productive. You see I am a recovering speed demon who used to think fast was the only tempo there was.

Quinn: Tell me what “slow” means in your world.

Christine: Slow means mindful living. It is embedded in the wisdom of choice. When we engage in the power of slow, we unleash shackled energy we have wasted stressing, rushing and worrying about things at a pace that obviously does not work for us.

Quinn: Most of us have to work to pay the bills and feed the family. How can we establish boundaries at work without losing our jobs?

Christine: Years ago my husband took a vacation, then lost his job right after. It was a frightening experience. It is important for employers to get on board with the notion that a well-rested worker is a productive one. Learning to say ‘no’ with kindness and clarity is something I talk a lot about in [the book].  When we say ‘no’ to others, we say ‘yes’ to ourselves. I find formulations such as “Here’s what I can do” and “I have an idea that might improve this even more” help sustain your boss or client’s listening far better than a flat-out ‘no’. Offer alternatives and constructive advice.

Quinn: Women are often the caretakers of both young children and older parents, squashing their time into ridiculous expectations. What advice do you have for the “sandwich generation” of women?

Christine: We women are indeed pulled in many directions at once. Learning to take ‘me-time’ is mission critical when you are a caretaker. Celebrate the ‘ma’, a Japanese term referring to the space between things. Plan your activities such that you have ten or fifteen minutes between them. Back-to-back action is often draining and over the long-term will wear you down. Bring back the ‘ma’ in me.

Quinn: People seem to take some pride in being “crazy busy.” Any danger in that?

Christine: I have noticed that ‘busy’ is the new fine. What I mean by that is people respond to ‘How are you?’ with ‘busy’ or ‘crazy busy’ much more often than the old stand-by ‘fine!’ Busy implies you are successful, but I would caution that activity does not always equal productivity.

Quinn: Are there any rules worth breaking in the standard time management advice? (Keep a to-do list, prioritize it into A, B, C-level tasks, tackle all the A-level first, etc.)

Christine: Oh, how I LOVE this question! Surely, the Eisenhower principle that helps you discern urgent from important tasks is a key strategy, and I talk about it in the book. Fundamentally, however, it is about your personal relationship with time itself. I do not believe in time management. First, time is an organizing principle we established to make sense of our live so it is a construct based on mutual agreement. Second, we cannot manage or control time. We can only manage or control the things we do within the time that we have.

Gossip Girls Grow Up

The email from a business contact looked like a scheduling issue, so I opened it up, expecting a question on availability. Not at all, it was asking me about some gossip circulating about me. Well, as it was gossip, I won’t support it, confirm it, deny it, or discuss it. I won’t pass it on, ask where it came from, or confront the person I may ferret out if I follow it long enough.

So I phoned up the acquaintance and said, “I don’t respond to gossip, I simply move on.”

“Then it must be true, otherwise you would defend yourself,” the acquaintance said.

It's private and untraceable

“Not at all,” I said. “I really hated seventh grade because I didn’t belong to the ‘cool’ group. I discovered that no matter what I did, gossip is like hot road tar–it sticks, it stains, it spreads on contact. I never learned how to make it work for me, and I always wound up getting stuck at the originator, because I was an easy target. Now that seventh grade is decades behind me, I have no desire to re-visit the bad old days.”

There was some back and forth, in which gossip originators were hinted at, and I was asked to respond. But I know what happens–the more I take the bait, the less the truth gets uncovered. Everyone I confront will deny involvement and point to someone else, wait till I’m out of earshot, and pass on another re-interpretation of what is happening.

So I’m stopping the chain of gossip. I told the acquaintance that I’d like the decision about the gossip to be made not on the gossip, but on my behavior and the satisfaction of the people who work with me.

I’m familiar with  “If you don’t tell me what really happened, I’ll think what they are saying is true.”

This is gossip girl bullying at its best. It’s similar to “If you love me, you would X” or “If you don’t do X, I won’t do Y and it will be your fault.” That type of manipulative behavior solves nothing. If you participate, you are becoming a moral doormat to prove some unattainable goal of acceptance. That goal changes the instant you do what is required.

Just as you are what you eat, you become what you watch. Reality shows that encourage watching emotional, personal train wrecks and gleefully cheering, dull you to the pain of others. Those shows eventually make you want that level of excitement in your life. Watch enough of them, and it looks normal.

I’m long out of seventh grade, and I’m not cranking up the way-back machine. Gossip girls are destructive, and I’m simply not participating. Not in any way. You want to believe gossip about me? That’s between you and your brain. Me, I’ve got things to do.

–Quinn McDonald is a trainer, writer, life- and creativity coach.

Slow Works, Slow Wins

You have an idea. It’s a great idea. You gather materials and carry it out. It doesn’t work. You give up. What made you think that would work, anyway?

Slow motion water burst from 3dverstas

Wait. Act fast, fail fast, criticize fast. All that speed doesn’t allow you to learn a damn thing. Cutting your losses doesn’t teach you anything except how to cut.

There is a huge benefit to doing things slowly. We live in a super-fast culture, but it’s the same culture that doesn’t like mistakes, that encourages blamestorming as a fair shot in competition.

What’s the benefit of slowing down?

You can anticipate. Slowing down let’s you think before you act. You can think through the next several steps to see if they are what you want, if those steps move you to the result. If they don’t, you can choose another plan.

Slowing down saves time. Anticipating helps you plan more than one step ahead, create a Plan B, and discover options. All that saves time. Saving time reduces anxiety and possibly money. All because you slowed down.

Practice helps you get it right. Slowing down allows you to practice your steps before you have to do them. Practicing anything, from a piano concerto to a speech, makes you better at it. “Winging it” will just result in making your mistakes public. Slow down. Practice. Then when you do it, it will work, and you will know how come it worked. That allows you to do it again–the right way.

Slowing down slows time down. When time slows down, you see more and you understand more. The more you understand, the more you learn, the more you can use what you know.

Excellence takes time. No one was born an expert. You are not the exception. When you do things step by step you can see mistakes, often before you make them. You have more time to do each step, if you aren’t racing. John Wheeler, the physicist, said, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” Take advantage of time.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, trainer and life coach. She understands the value of slow.

PowerPoint to Video, Just Like That

Yesterday, I blogged about improving PowerPoint presentations. One of the comments was by Zhenya Gospodinova who works for SmartSoft.  She told me about a product her company sells, and left a link.

A good idea grows on you.

I spiked the comment. I have too many people who leave random comments with their ads in them, and my post wasn’t about PowerPoint, it was about using PowerPoint.

To her credit, Zhenya was persistent in a good way. No name calling, or accusations, she apologized for advertising her company, and sent me a sample of the software, a PowerPoint to video converter. I’m a bit thick, but I am also curious. I couldn’t open the software, largely because I still write with a fountain pen and do not intuit the answer to questions like “how would you like to open this software?” The question came from my computer and while I said, “quickly, please,” I think it wanted me to choose one software to open another. That is beyond my pay grade.

Frequent poster, and coding language speaker Pete had it open in a flash. He liked it. But I was persistent in my skepticism.

“Why do I need to put my PowerPoint presentation on a video, Pete? So I can jerk around the fast forward button on a video? I don’t see that as an improvement,” I grumbled.

Pete is nothing if not patient. “With this software, you can send a PowerPoint presentation to someone who doesn’t have PowerPoint. You can post a PowerPoint to YouTube as a video, which makes it look professional and makes it easy to use.”

I suddenly remembered that my web host doesn’t support PowerPoint–”So I can create a PowerPoint and post it to my website?” I asked Pete, knowing that I could create slide shows of the traveling journals.

Pete assured me that I could convert a PowerPoint to video and post it to my website.  Then told me his favorite part–you can email a PowerPoint presentation on your cell phone and someone else can see it on their smartphone or other mobile device.

Now, if only I could figure out how to install it, I’d be a happy file user. Any tips, Zhenya? (If you’re still speaking to me, that is.)

NOTE: The program is for Windows only, which is disappointing, as I have a Mac, and not the big iMac, which has Windows as well.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and trainer in writing skills. She is no software genius, but she knows a good thing when she sees it

PowerPoint: Stories, Not Bullets

Not everyone who can make type on a keyboard is a writer. Writing is a skill that’s learned through practice. Writing well isn’t easy and it doesn’t come naturally. So I teach people how to write.  Clearly. Concisely. How to give presentations. How to write the presentations they give, using PowerPoint.

Poor PowerPoint. It’s been so misused, I may have to open a shelter for abused PowerPoint

Seth Godin's book is a starting point for help, but it won't write your presentation for you.

presentations. You know them–the ones with overloaded slides. With charts that need an engineer and an explanation to make sense. With all those bullet points.

You thought bullet points were the cure, right? You thought they were the solution to bad PowerPoint. Nope. They are one of the ways to ruin a PowerPoint presentation

Although I teach a full-day course on writing and designing effective PowerPoint presentations, here are  five quick tips on how to improve your PowerPoint presentations. Today. If you follow these five steps your next PowerPoint will be better than your last.

1.Don’t do what you hate seeing. What do you hate about other people’s PowerPoint presentations? Write down the three worst things people do. Then don’t do any of them. The ones I see most often are: too many bullets, no story development, horrible design.

2. PowerPoint was never designed to be report-writing software. Using it that way will ruin your presentation and give you a lousy report at the same time. PowerPoint was designed to have engineers talk to marketing. It’s a presentation software. Use it for that. What about the report? Well, if you do your presentation right, you will also be able to generate the report, but not in the same step.

3. Start with the story. Don’t start by opening PowerPoint and designing the slide. That’s not the story. If you start creating your presentation by opening PowerPoint, you get caught up in design instead of story. Presentations are always about the story. PowerPoint is a presentation aid. It helps you add visuals and emphasis, helps people remember what you said, influences their thinking, but it cannot be the content-carrier. Providing content is your job. How do you write a good story? Best way to start is to ask yourself: What do I want the people to think/do/believe when I’m done?

4. Stop using bullets. Most bullet points are unrelated topic headings that presenters use to know what to say next. That information belongs in the “Notes” section of PowerPoint. If you’ve never heard of the Notes section, don’t do another presentation until you’ve learned the good side of this powerful software. Most people put information that belongs in Notes on the screen. That’s the fast track to losing your audience.

5. Use images that help tell your story. For example, which makes you more interested in the topic of “Summertime home repairs”–a slide that reads:

Tips for Summertime Home Repairs

• Time home repairs to suit the heat
• Don’t paint wood that gets full sun in a.m.
• Wood will warp when sun dries paint

A picture adds to your words in ways explanations cannot.

Or seeing this photo, while the presenter says, “Home repair is tricky when it gets hot. Wood soaks up paint. The sun dries it, but it also warps it, giving you a white picket fence that needs braces.”

The objection I hear most often is, “Well, where do I get pictures I can afford?” It always makes me smile. It makes me realize that most people write PowerPoint with only half the tools–words, but no photos or planned images.

Often the words are as poorly planned as the images, but words are free, so they are made to substitute for images.

In the day-long class, we look at your past PowerPoints and see what went wrong, learn what a PowerPoint can (and can’t) do for you and for the audience, dig for the purpose of your presentation, learn the basics of telling a story, choosing effective colors for your presentation, how to find and use photos, designing charts and graphs for presentations (because you can’t use the same one you used in the report), and, yes, when to use bullets in your presentation. You’ll learn the five biggest mistakes and how to avoid them, when to use a slide and how to use PowerPoint to make your presentation work for you, rather than be your presentation that you are enslaved to delivering.

--Quinn McDonald is a writing instructor who helps people design and give powerful presentations. See all of her training topics. (c) QuinnCreative, Quinn McDonald, 2009