Ever since I started working for my last company (before retirement), I had been exposed to presentations. For the most part, I watched others make presentations but as time went on, I found myself making more and more of them. Being part of the audience and being in front of the audience taught me a lot about how effective (and ineffective) presentations are made.
I've attended a few seminars on making presentations but many of the lessons are outdated today. Furthermore, many of the tips are not necessarily best practices but common practices, and do not really do anything to improve understandability and memory retention.
One of the worst practice that I've seen (and still being done today) is creating slides with too much information in them. The most common is the bullet point slide.
If you think the example above is bad, I've seen worst, slides with as much as 20 bullet points on them. When you put that slide up on the screen, this is what happens:
- The audience will start reading the list and not listen to your talking about the first bullet point. They're already reading the fifth bullet point or maybe even further down the list while you're still on the first.
- They will begin discussing the other bullet points, usually the one you're not discussing yet.
- They will continue to discuss the bullet point you already finished discussing while you're already on another one.
The point (pun not intended) is that when you give the audience more than one idea, message, or piece of information, they will choose which one they will give their attention to.
The solution is to give them only one idea/message/piece of information at a time. That way, they won't be distracted and will listen to you talk about the idea/message/piece of information you put up on the screen.
This is just one of the tips I included in the book, and there are more of them. From slide design, to delivery, to tips on how to improve yourself as a presenter. Try it out. Download it at:
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