IEEE Professional Communication Society Newsletter • ISSN 1539-3593 • Volume 52, Number 11 •Dec. '08/Jan. 2009
« Back Next »
Feature

Bite the bullet: How not to kill your presentation with your slides

by Elizabeth Frick

In the days before anesthetics, soldiers bit on bullets to help them endure pain. Modern medicine has sent the term "bite the bullet" into metaphor. If you have sat through poorly-prepared presentations in meetings or customer reviews, you'll understand this metaphor (which now is equivalent to "Bring out the Blackberry®").

Microsoft® Powerpoint® doesn't kill presentations; people using Powerpoint (PP) kill presentations. Effective slides present both verbal and visual information concisely, clearly, and powerfully. The medium is ideally suited to create a synergy between these elements. Shoveling Word or Excel documents into slides simply does not work.

In this article, I'll cover five verbal and five visual principles that can help guide your development of effective slides.

Verbal principles

1. Create a story: Good communicators tell stories. Use the following simple formula for stories in business and technical communication:

  • What?
  • So what?
  • Now what?

Let's say you are proposing a security upgrade. Tell the story of a former employee found talking to employees in the clean room (the "what?"). The "so what?" is that your department is about to undergo a quality audit, and this breach could hurt your results. "Now what?" Now you argue for security upgrades. Your story has made your point.

2. Organize your thoughts: Psychologists suggest that the human brain may generate 50,000 thoughts a day. My thoughts are certainly random, so I never sit down at the computer and create any written document, let alone a PP slide show, without first brainstorming my randomness onto paper, then organizing my ideas with an outline. Only then will I fire up the computer. Throughout the process of creating slides, I will constantly test my organization and move ideas around as logic dictates.

3. Show your organization: PP provides several levels of organization. The title slide announces your main topic; each slide after that has a slide title for subtopics; bullet and sub-bullet points provide your third and fourth levels of organization. Help your reader or listener understand your logical organization by broadcasting that logic. Take your outline and fit it, wherever possible, into the slide design.

4. Use 6 or fewer words in a bullet point: Although your high school English teacher would cringe at this advice, avoid using sentences in each bulleted line.

Tighten your text to six or fewer words. Strip out redundancy; for example, "ATM machine" is redundant, as the acronym stands for Automated Teller Machine. And, consider leaving out articles like "the" and "a" and omitting personal pronouns, such as "you" as well as prepositions. Here's an example of tightening a bullet point:

Long version: Pick up election supplies the day before the election is to take place (13 words)

Tightened version: Locate supplies 1 day before election (6 words)

Shorter bulleted lines encourage you to use the text as prompts or talking points. Nothing kills a presentation faster than a presenter's reading the bullet points; this is known as "a fool with a tool is still a fool." (The number 6 may be a little arbitrary. Some call for a maximum of 5 words; others advocate 7 words. Six words per line seems the best middle way to me.)

5. Use simple words where appropriate: Simpler words are best wherever possible in all forms of writing, but especially in PP. The word "use" expresses as much linguistic information as the word "utilize," and it fits better across the line. Of course, if you need technical terms such as "hemodiafiltration," you probably won't find a simpler word. Nevertheless, using the shorter word "help" rather than "accommodate" elsewhere will keep your bullet points shorter and cleaner (and the shorter word is almost always easier to spell than the longer word).

Visual principles

1. Select a template: Perhaps your company has corporate templates; of course, you'll use those. However, if you have free rein, be careful to select a very simple template, preferably one with a light background and dark type. The opposite (dark background, light type) is almost unreadable, and when you print handouts, the dark background leaves no place to write on the slides. Don't be afraid to modify the template through the Master view, as long as you keep it simple.

2. Use sans serif typeface: Sans serif typefaces do not have strokes or lines on the letters, which makes text much more readable onscreen. But don't use Arial on slides, even if it may be the default typeface in PP. Instead, use Verdana or Tahoma, typefaces that were commissioned by Microsoft for best readability. As for type size, the defaults in PP are probably good for starters. Be sure to test your slides in a room as large as the one in which you'll be presenting: Can you read the text easily from the back row?

3. Show the idea: You may not be a graphic artist, but experiment a bit to create a visual representation of the ideas you're trying to express on certain slides. Photographs work well if they are high quality and fit well on the slide. Perhaps a simple bar chart could show comparisons. Pictures and graphics are elements that carry and evoke emotion, so if you're trying to make a point, these will be the most effective way to show your ideas.

4. Use no more than 6 bulleted lines per slide: Some experts suggest limiting your words/bullet points to five each (5x5=25 words); others insist upon 7x7, for a total of 49 words. Limiting each slide to no more than 6 bullet points with 6 or fewer words each seems like a good compromise. More than 6 bullet points? Split them between two or more slides.

5. Edit visually: Step back from your slides and look at visual and verbal elements as a whole. If you're not good at visual editing (I'm not), find a colleague who can help you decide if your visual elements are sized and placed properly. Do your visual elements overwhelm the text? Or does the text swamp the visual? Work toward balancing these elements.

Again, practicing these verbal and visual principles as you create your slides will mean that you'll never have to apologize to your viewers: "I know you can't see this, but this is what it says…."

****************

, the Text Doctor®, teaches technical and business writing for international, national, and Denver-Metro companies. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota.

 

 



 

« Back Top of page Next »