Background: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD made a presentation at a TEDx event; while praising her content, Les Posen remarked on her delivery; Ms. Swisher told him to go pound sand; Les blogged a thorough critique.

I agree with Les that it would be nice if people making presentations put some work into presentation design, rehearsal, and delivery. That said, I think Les suffers from a mild case of presentationism.

Presentationism (n): An affliction in which otherwise reasonable people start treating presentations as objects in themselves instead of vehicles for content. Symptoms include the inability to filter out annoying details while watching presentations, and a loss of focus on the content being delivered. (Yes, I made that neologism up.)

Having watched Ms. Swisher’s presentation, I  have some notes on structure and argument; her sardonic remarks are a style of public speaking — one which I, like Les, happen to dislike, but speakers’ styles should be their own; I agree that minor stagecraft and a speaker’s display would make a big difference in the delivery.

But none of that matters, really.

Ms. Swisher is a journalist and writer, and a very busy one at that. As I said in my post on preparing presentations, those of us for whom presenting is a big part of the job can be expected to invest serious time in preparation and rehearsal; for others, like Ms Swisher, that would be a wrong trade-off to make. I certainly don’t want fewer articles on AllThingsD, which — time not being elastic — would probably be the cost of Ms. Swisher preparing presentations more thoroughly.

In the end, for those of us not suffering from presentationism, content is what matters most. I’d rather listen to monotone, heavily German-accented Henry Kissinger talk about geopolitics (I don’t like him but he knows his geopolitics) than to slick presentations by razzle-dazzle “globalization” experts know-nothings.

Content should be king, for the presenter and for the audience.

— — —

And speaking of, erm, uh, you know, verbal tics, I looked at Tufte’s presentation at the State Department again and noticed two things about his opener:

1. It’s a summary of his presentation: “The goal of analytical design is to make people smarter.” This is one great opener, instead of the too-common list of thanks and acknowledgments wasting the prime time of audience attention. That I had noticed immediately; like James Humes, I believe that the choice of opener is a great predictor of the quality of the presentation.

2. He delivered it thusly:  ”The, uh, goal of, eh, analytical design is to make people smarter.” I never noticed till now. I hope to continue not noticing.