Is it OK to read from my PowerPoint slides?
The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience”. Consistently, the worst advice speakers and presenters get, comes from everyone who is NOT your audience. The following gives examples of some of the WORST advice people are often given. It is followed by the advice of your audience. Listen to them. They are your true judge and jury.
Is it OK to read from my PowerPoint slides?
Your Marketing Director: “Try to read 20% or less of the time.”
Your Speech coach: “Try to read 10% or less of the time.”
You: “In an ideal world, I won’t read at all, but I don’t have time to rehearse and I want to get each word just right, so I will read 50% of the time.”
***
Your audience: “How insulting that you would read to us! What? You think we are too stupid to read on our own? You must think we are illiterate! For the love of Pete, just talk to us and tell us what you know. If we want to read stuff later, we will.”
Tags: powerpoint presentation, public speaking, reading from slides
February 27th, 2008 at 7:03 am
[…] your Powerpoint presentation to a next level Jump to Comments TJ Walker posted this week an interesting analysis on powerpoint slides. In fact, as a teacher in the […]
April 24th, 2008 at 1:39 am
Your post about powerpoint is definitely timely.
I think everyone in business has been in this situation: trying, and failing, to pay attention during an important but overly boring presentation due to powerpoint overload.
Here is my advice if power-point must be used:
1: Close Outlook
Close Outlook when you are showing PowerPoint slides. Otherwise, email alerts pop up.
2: Slideshow Mode
Always use the slideshow mode: it makes your slides easier to see.
3: Standing in projector beam
Always avoid standing in the projector beam, as it is distracting.
4: Bullets as hooks
Think of the bullets on your slides as hooks. By that I mean that the bullet should remind you of your talking points but also incite curiosity in your audience. Use questions, alliteration (repetition of consonants) or juxtaposition of ideas to intrigue the audience. For example:
· Why Automate Processes?
· License to Fail
· Magnet Markets
· Customers: Faithful or Fickle?
· Plan or Wing It?
· Tragedy or Triumph?
5: Use more images
Incorporate images and negative visual space. Break up all the linear text on your slides with stories, examples, images & metaphors. Otherwise, you are not engaging your audience’s right hemisphere, the brain’s center of imagination. That’s when our minds start to drift, in spite of the fact that the data may be important for us to learn and understand. Use more imagery coupled with metaphor. The image search engine that I use is image.google.com. You can save the image files you find to your hard drive and insert them into PowerPoint. Use files that are between 30 – 100K for good clarity without bloating your PowerPoint file.
6: Simplify text
Most PowerPoint slides are loaded with way too much text. Distill your slides down into simple bullet points with 4 or 6 words per bullet max. Instead, think of the bullets as hooks.
Trim, trim, trim and never read from powerpoint!