I’ve written in this space several times about stories — as opposed to data-filled PowerPoint slides — as the linchpin of effective presentations. In her Musings blog, Christine Thompson recently compiled several excellent resources for better — and often storied — presentations.

Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds, and Dan Roam are Thompson’s favorites, each offering both a Web site/blog and a book on or related to presentations. None of the three are totally story-focused, but story plays a presentation role for all three.

You can find storytelling in several places on Duarte’s site/blog: Clicking on the storytelling tag yields a few blog entries focusing on storytelling; she offers story-and-structure, as well as visiual-storytelling sessions in her Webinars, and you can preview some of the story-related content of her book, Slide:ology (this book, along with Reynolds’s PresentationZen Design, are the best resources, Thompson says, and Duarte also praises Reynolds’s book in a recent blog entry).

The best way to pinpoint story content on Reynolds’s Presentation Zen blog is to conduct a search on the term “storytelling”, resulting at this writing in 157 mentions.

Roam’s material is the least story-oriented of the three (at least overtly); his focus is on visual thinking. His book is The Back of the Napkin, and you can download nice bits of it.

Thompson also cites the books Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World, by Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath.

For a reminder of the power of stories in presentations, check out this storied Steve Jobs speech that reader Lisa Rosetti shared with me. In a way, it’s not a perfect example of stories in presentations because it’s a graduation speech, where PowerPoint slides would be quite unusual. So, this is not a case of someone opting to deliver a storied presentation instead of a slide-based one. But it’s still very good.

Listen as Jobs tells his audience that he plans to tell them three stories and then does just that: