According to Microsoft, there are over 30 million PowerPoint presentations given every day. Nearly all of them are PowerPointless.

I started my career at a Fortune 500 company that had over 40,000 employees. I then moved to Brazil to work for a company with 50 employees.

Regardless of the size of the company, geographic location of the employees, or the language that colleagues spoke, the overwhelming majority of the presentations I was forced to endure were terrible.

The reasons for this vary. If you’ve been in any kind of environment where colleagues have to present on a regular basis I’m sure you can relate. As a simple experiment - think about all of the workplace presentations you’ve sat through in your life. How many do you remember? How many were a complete waste of time?

Although some of this post will discuss how PowerPoint has made presentations suck for everyone (sorry friends at Microsoft), that won’t be the main focus.

Instead, it will be to help you and your colleagues give better presentations with little to no extra effort.

I was two months into my new job in Rio de Janeiro when I asked my co-worker to hand me a hard penis.

His gaze shifted towards me and his eyes paused, narrowed, and a cheeky grin slowly came across his face. Within ten seconds the normally stoic Jose was on the floor, doubled over laughing. “Oh shit,” I thought, “What did I just say?”

It wasn’t the first time I’d made a mistake when learning Portuguese and it wouldn’t be the last. Confusing ‘pão duro’ for ‘pau duro’ (the squiggly line, the tilde, above the ‘a’) proved to be the fatal error – instead of asking for bread, like I had intended, I had asked Jose for something very different.

The nasal tone of the tilde is a critical distinction among many similarly sounding words in Brazilian Portuguese. But no matter how many times I had tried learning the language with audio tapes, YouTube videos, or through immersion, the lesson had never really sunk in until that one fatal error I made with Jose.

I now pay very close attention to the tilde when speaking Portuguese.

Most presentations suck. Here’s what you can do about it.

Fastest Way To Learn a Language: Act like a child.