"I was planning on doing a lot of work today during your presentation, but I couldn't get anything done. I just had to pay attention!" The author received this unexpected feedback from a teacher at the end of a presentation he gave, and although he considered it a compliment, it made him reflect on the dire state of presentations in education and elsewhere. "Poor timing, poor speaking, and poor slides" usually make the topic of the talk "dead on arrival." As an alternate to PowerPoint slides loaded with bullet points and lots of text, with an OK speaker who often reads the slides out loud, the author suggests a different approach. Speakers should analyze their audience to better tailor their presentation to their audience members' needs, scale back the information they wish to present so listeners can more easily absorb it, and use visual aids. He also suggests that if we want to get people enthused about what we say, we need to work on developing more passion in our words.