Tags: creative writing creative writing exercise fiction writing fictional character So that your characters don’t all look alike, sound alike and act alike, characters should have distinct features. It is particularly important for you to know your main characters well—to have a solid sense of who they are. Yes, there can be similarities between two major characters, but differences

I once attended a political forum that gave "pointed" a whole new meaning, when an audience member asked how much time the candidates would spend on their elected role. One candidate looked at the front row where the other candidate's family--including newborn twins--was seated. Pointing at them, she snapped, "I don't see how my opponent can say he'll work full time when he has two little babies to take care of!"

Exposing ourselves to traditional Japanese aesthetic ideas — notions that may seem quite foreign to most of us — is a good exercise in lateral thinking, a term coined by Edward de Bono in 1967. "Lateral Beginning to think about design by exploring the tenets of the Zen aesthetic may not be an example of Lateral Thinking in the strict sense, but doing so is a good exercise in stretching ourselves and really beginning to think differently about visuals and design in our everyday professional lives. Lateral Thinking is for changing concepts and perception," says de Bono. The principles

Ideally, you would plan for audience participation exercises to be roughly evenly spaced through the presentation. However, having genuine, as opposed to contrived, exercises is more important. Your audience participation exercise should include time for them to think about what they want to say and/or an opportunity to rehearse what they want to say. Yesterday I had a skype conversation with Twitter follower Todd (@TJList) on how to include audience participation in a presentation. He’s presenting on getting through the economic downturn to an audience of small

You can go to the Blue Zones website to get all the details. Move Naturally (1) You don't need a formal, rigorous exercise plan. Do exercises/activities that you enjoy. Have Right Outlook (2) Slow down. Happy New Year, everyone. I hope 2010 is a healthy and meaningful one for you all.

Just as an exercise I took this list of "10 things" and made them into ten slides that could be a part of a lesson of sorts. Still, more than anything this was merely an exercise in making visuals that may be used in a future Ignite talk. The other day I was watching this interview with Eric Schlosser on The Colbert Report. Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation and was on Colbert to promote a new documentary called Food, Inc.

In preparation for her talk she asked me if there would be a way to reproduce an exercise called “Speaker & Audience Mapping” that she usually leads in the slideology workshops . The exercise goes like this: the audience picks one of a dozen different audience types (eg. Naturally, we began to use the very same exercise to find a solution for how to teach it. Last month Nancy Duarte spoke at Web2.0 Expo and it was a huge success.

Ice  breakers; presentation of formal content; software demos (for IT training); group exercises and activities; discussion; formative and summative assessment Unless I’ve missed something important, there seem to be three distinct uses for real-time online commmunications. The following table represents a first attempt at clarifying the discriminating characteristics of these three:  

then using PP's, (and videos, and exercises, and SHARP's, etc.) With all the recent emphasis on the design of your PowerPoints (Keynote for the Mac), it's time to revisit the fact that your visuals are NOT your presentation. You and your Point of View are the centerpiece. I

Or if your presentation includes interactive exercises for the audience take those moments to look at the Twitterstream. Presenting while people are tweeting is challenging – but also adds a new dimension to the presentation experience for your audience. Gradually tools are being developed to make it easier for you as the presenter to manage the backchannel.