F… Bullet Points

And when I say F… I mean forget. People have gotten into the bad habit of filling their presentations with bullet points, it’s not really our fault, that’s how we have been taught to create slideshows. What is the first thing that show’s up when you open Power Point?

This first screen is telling us that we must have a title and we must put content on the slide, and if we do so, it organizes it automatically with bullet points. So now you think: “Well, okay, Microsoft is wrong”. But it is not only Microsoft, still today, if you pick up a book on how to make presentations many times you come across the 1-6-6 rule: 1 concept per slide, 6 lines per slide and 6 words per line. The problem with that is that it is what we are used to seeing. Something like this:

A great deal of presenters fill their slides with text and then just read it to the audience. Believe me, the audience can read. If you are going to produce slides like those, you might as well make a word document and send it to them attached in an email, saves time and energy. I know that if you are trying to present in a foreign language it is easier to write everything and hide behind your slides, but you should be doing exactly the opposite, the more visual you are the better. Practice what you want to say until you don’t need to read it, and then impact your audience by using visuals that will enforce your message. When you are making a presentation you should be telling a story, focus on that story and create slides that will support it, not get in the way. Remember: people can’t do 2 things at once; they can’t listen at the same time they are reading your slides. So, make simple slides which support your ideas and not take your audience’s attention off your story. If it is important that they read or see certain, more complex, information, give it to them in a handout after you are done.

Give this a shot in your next presentation, use only keywords in your slides as opposed to text and substitute some of those words for images to make the message more powerful. Follow up this approach in the next blog post Concept Slides.