Presentation Ninja Tricks #2: Produce
In the first post of this series, I shared with you how to get started with planning your presentation. In this post, we’ll focus on the second phase: Produce.
Produce
There’s something evil out there. Something that quickly and surely will drain your audience and leave them tired, unfocused and looking at their watches. That evil is bullet points.
Do not use bullet points!
Don’t be tempted to use Powerpoint or Keynote’s default first slide with bullet points. It’s the worst mistake you could ever make.
A classic bullet point slide. Boring, uninspiring and hard to read (made for my Elevator Pitch talk at Flash on the Beach as an example of how NOT to make presentation slides.
The brain cannot keep focus on both listening and reading at the same time. Also, we tend to “chunk” information into smaller groups – which means that long bullet point lists are simply too overwhelming for us to take in – especially because we’re using our hearing sense at the same time.
So, what’s the alternative to using bullet points?
Put one bullet on one slide.
A slide without bullet points is much more pleasing for the audience to look at.
Bullet point lists are great as supporting notes for your presentation, but they belong in your notes, not on the slides. Both Powerpoint and Keynote have a presenter notes function built in. Use it!
Visualise
Slides should work as visual support for your message. A place where the audience can rest their eyes – not a space they have to dedicate 80% of their brainpower to decode.
We know from perception theory that humans decode visuals first. First we see graphics, then headlines and highlighted text, and finally, body text. The Picture Superiority Effect also suggests that concepts are more likely to be remembered if they are presented as pictures as opposed to in words. So use images to support your message.
The cognitive theory about Dual-coding mentions that we have 2 mental systems in which we store information: a visual system and a verbal system (more information about the Dual-coding theory can be found here).
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