Power presenting for cognitive retention and organizational longevity

We discuss much-tested, stronger techniques for engineers, instructors, trainers, and technical experts who use presentation slides as part of their work output. We draw from 1) practicing engineers who participated in interviews for a three-year NSF sponsored study on how people learn engineering (n=56); 2) practicing engineers enrolled in two online, graduate, professional engineering programs (n=60+); and 3) the work of experts including cognitive psychologists and visual rhetoric experts that has focused on the slide format in professional settings. Based on research from several fields, these techniques have worked well on several fronts for our practicing engineers; techniques include malleable methods of deploying sentence headers, rhetorical visuals, information layers, and archival organizational notes, amongst others. When practiced in a workplace setting by our graduate engineers, these methods have impressed engineering management and technical colleagues alike as new standards of “best practice” to emulate within their organizations.