Getting a word in on presentations

More thoughts on presentations? Well, it’s true, if you google “presentations” you get over 57 million results! Lots of them mention probably things like ‘don’t just read the slides’, ‘keep the word count on each slide to a minimum’, ‘use a sufficiently large font’ – we haven’t counted them all. But it is tricky to…

A passion for crime

Sherlock Holmes, Chief Inspector Barnaby, Dalziel and Pascoe, Miss Marple. We all love reading and watching detectives. But why exactly is that, what makes a detective successful? To find this out, I recently attended a crime fiction writing workshop in Oxford, England. With great enthusiasm, I dived into the world of suspense, betrayal and murder,…

Crops and climate change

A good story is a simple story: for instance: “EU bans harmful pesticides”. As a headline, it’s clear, direct, and for a lifelong environmentalist like me, it sounds like a good thing. The trouble is, there is another side to the story, one with serious consequences for climate change. This shows that telling a simple…