Despite the potentially blasphemous title of this article, I’d like to continue the theme of bad visual aids and bad PowerPoint presentations from last week with this list of 10 things to do when you present a slide show.
- Speak to your audience before launching your visuals.
- Keep eye contact primarily with your audience, not with your visual aids.
- Avoid reading your slides or overheads to your audience, please.
- Keep text to a minimum; let images and graphics illustrate and dramatize your points.
- Use a font style that is simple and large enough (generally sans serif styles at least 20-24 points) to be read at a distance.
- Keep the number of points to 3 - 5 per slide.
- Ensure consistency of syntax on each slide (e.g., if the first bullet point starts with a verb, all subsequent bullet points should start with a verb-it’s easier to comprehend and more powerful).
- Take time to introduce - and pause to allow the audience time to absorb - any - complex information (e.g., from a graph or chart).
- Put your slide titles to work: they should help deliver the message not merely give a name to the slide.
- Turn off the projector or overhead to focus attention and re-claim the spotlight.
I think this is one of those moments where I can safely say that we are ALL learning in this class, myself included.
