Creating themes - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

Have you ever been to a presentation and found yourself overwhelmed, confused, or just totally lost in the middle of it? You probably shut down and stopped listening altogether. This can happen. When a presenter does something called fire hosing, they give you way too much information without any structure. It can also happen when content is put together all Willy nilly or better said not put together with much thought at all. And if you do that, you'll lose your audience early and late. For good in this video, I'm going to show you how to take your content brainstorm and turn it into powerful main points that help you support your core message. Once you have a large mix of sticky notes with content on them, you create themes from that content. These themes can become early drafts of main points for the outline. This nonlinear way of creating content gives a better chance of revealing the very best content versus just going with whatever comes top of mind for this presentation. So imagine I have a file folder just full of brainstormed ideas. One idea per sticky note, when you gather these, they don't need to be in any special order because you've just written them all. As the ideas came to you, the process from here, Pickup each sticky note and assess how it fits with the others. Start with your very first sticky note and just go one at a time. Seeing what themes emerge you can work pretty intuitively when you do this, just seeing what sets of ideas start to. The themes that show up can vary widely, depending on your content brainstorm, you might break up your content into description of the problem, misconceptions about the problem and solutions that work, or in a recent presentation. I mapped out about cross-country moving the themes that showed up, where your stuff saying goodbye to people and your new home pretty soon. You've gone through all the sticky notes and you'll have anywhere from three to seven piles. You'll also likely have some outliers. You can deal with those when it comes time to actually craft your outline. If you try this, you'll see how pretty quickly you start creating. Organization out of the initial chaos of brainstorming. This is how you can move from your highly creative brainstorming process toward a structured outline that will drive a captivating and engaging presentation.