Handbook of Business Communication

Peter Handler

4Business presentations

1.Introduction

2.Fundamentals

3.A complex praxis

4.Informatization and multimodal media usage

5.Interaction rhetoric

6.Visualisation

7.Temporal and spatial dissociation

8.Conclusion

1Introduction

Presentations play an important, even dominant role in corporate communication. They constitute an extremely common (semi‑)formal communication activity. For a top executive, rare is the working day without some form of presentation (cf. Barabel and Meier 2006: 237–238). Presentations are an integral part of numerous business tasks, including day-to-day management, organising institutional change, describing technical processes and even crisis management.

Nowadays, large-scale use is made of presentation software, ...