Thoughts On Presenting & Design mike-pulsifer.org

Presentation Hell

One of my areas of personal improvement of late has been in the area of improving the way I give presentations.  This was spurred on by being fed up with having to endure presentations such as the one below (go to the original at pcweenies.com).

Presentation Hell

This happens all too often and it happens everywhere.  Nobody wants to watch someone else read from their slides.  It detracts from the presentation and conveys to the audience the sense that either the presenter doesn't really know what they're talking about or they weren't considerate enough to prepare ahead of time.  Besides, if the information is going to be read word for word, the presenter might as well just give hand-outs and not bother saying a word because the spoken presentation doesn't contribute to the audience's understanding of the material.

One book I would recommend to anyone that gives presentations with slides is Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds.  In this book, the author promotes keeping the slides simple, yet powerful.  Slides should help reinforce what the presenter is saying and not "be the presentation," if you will.  If the audience is reading the slides or putting effort into interpreting a complex chart or graph, then they're not listening to the person speaking.  If the audience isn't listening, they're not paying attention to the presentation.

Making slides that are simple, yet effective isn't easy.  It's far easier (and lazier) to just slap a bunch of bullet points on the slides.  However, bullet points are the easiest way to kill your presentation.  I'm not saying there's never any value in them.  They need to be used judiciously, intelligently, and sparingly.

This is something I will be blogging about a lot more as time goes on.