Make Much better Powerpoint presentations By Limiting The Amount Of Text In Your Slides
Your audience cannot both listen to you and read your slides at the same time. Therefore, you should not show too much text on your slides. You will find that the best presenters hardly use text at all in their slides. It is useful to push technical, complicated or textual data into a handout.
When you do write text on your slides, do not write out everything that you will say! Use text to write down a simple, brief statement that can serve as a summary or introduction to what you will talk about. The text must not tell the complete story – otherwise your audience would be better served if you simply emailed them your presentation. The slides should not be like subtitles on the TV – they should not be a text version of what is already coming out of your mouth.
Slides should be used to support your presentation. They should not be able to stand on their own. They should not serve any purpose outside of the context of your live presentation. Presentation slides are ephemeral – something unique to that moment in time. Once your presentation is over, the purpose of your slides existence is over.
The best slides may have no text at all. This may sound crazy given the dependency of text slides today, but the best slides will be virtually meaningless with out the narration that you provide. Remember, the slides are meant to support the narration of the speaker, not make the speaker superfluous.
If after my presentation someone ever asks me to email them a copy of my slides, I find this to be a great tragedy. Because it means that the person will be able to understand my slides from my presentation alone, which raises the question of whether I really needed to be there at all, and whether my presence actually added anything to the audiences experience.
The bottom line: If your audience can understand your presentation from your slides, do you need to be there?
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