[The lecturing of Boltzmann] was the most beautiful and stimulating thing I have ever heard . He was so enthusiastic about everything he taught us that one left every lecture with the feeling that a completely new and wonderful world had been revealed. ^[1]

Lise Meitner

In their careers, scientists and engineers make many presentations, and these presentations are expensive in terms of the time expended by the audience to attend and by the presenter to prepare. Yet all too often, scientific presentations are not nearly as effective as they could be at either communicating the information or persuading the audience. All too often, the presenter creates a presentation without contemplating the situation: the audience, the purpose, and the occasion. For instance, one common error is presenting the information at too complex a level for the audience to comprehend. Another common error is relying on defaults from presentation programs such as Microsoft's PowerPoint to produce presentation slides that are burdened with bullets and void of needed images.

In regard to presentation slides, this book has called for a revamping of the designs used by most scientists and engineers. Instead of recommending slide designs that rely on phrase headlines and bulleted lists, this book has called for presentation slides anchored with sentence headlines and supporting images. Although such slides take more time to create, the benefits in a scientific pre-sentation are more than worth the extra time expended. One benefit is a better orienting of the audience during the presentation.