Winning Strategies for Power Presentations: Jerry Weissman Delivers Lessons from the World’s Best Presenters

2. Kill Your Darlings

A Lesson from Professional Writers

Historian Amanda Foreman, the author of the bestselling Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, followed it a decade later with A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. In describing her creative process for the Wall Street Journal’s “Word Craft” column, she provided a valuable lesson for presenters:

The fruit of my 11 years of research meant that I had more than 400 characters scattered over four regions.... This vast mass of material was so unwieldy that I could hardly work my way through the first day of the conflict, let alone all four years.¹

While few presenters spend 11 years developing their stories about their businesses, they, like Ms. Foreman, have a vast ...