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“Hi. I’m Abe
Lincoln. My first slide lays out a timeline for our nation.
As you can see reading from left to right, it really all started four
score and seven years ago. . . .”
Of course
that wouldn’t have done at all. But if there is any doubt that
there is a growing backlash against PowerPoint, you need only
look at the proliferation of PowerPoint spoofs on the
internet. A funny one is Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,
www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm.
You can also
find spoofs of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream”
speech,
www.aaronsw.com/2002/classicPowerpoint, and the Pledge of
Allegiance,
www.slate.msn.com/id/2097842/.
For the
record, Speechworks is not anti-PowerPoint. Visual aids can
help your presentation have more impact. But PowerPoint is
certainly overused.
There is
almost always an inverse relationship between the quality of
the presentation and the number of PowerPoint slides.
We recently
worked with a large Atlanta company that banned PowerPoint
from its national sales meeting. And the meeting went great!
Here are a
few tips to ensure that your PowerPoint doesn’t ruin your
presentation.
-
You are
the most important visual aid. Don’t use slides that take
too much attention away from you.
-
Use fewer
slides. For a 30-minute presentation, keep it to eight
slides.
-
Don’t
murder your audience with bullets. If you’re going to have
text in your slides, then keep the bullets to a minimum. No
one is going to read it all anyway.
-
Pictures
have impact. The best slides show photographs that the
audience can quickly grasp.
-
Complex
diagrams are terrible. Too often we see complicated
diagrams of business processes that would only make sense if
the audience had a lot of time to digest the slide. But
usually, these slides are up and gone in seconds.
-
Don’t read
your slides. If you’re going to read to the audience, hand
out the slides and let them read it themselves. You’ll save
everyone’s time.
Speechworks helps clients communicate in a way that connects and
persuades. If you’d like help connecting with listeners, call
us at 404-266-0888. Or check out our website at
www.speechworks.net. |
