By Carla
Kimball
It’s 9:30 in the morning and you’ve made it
to the third presentation of today’s marketing meeting.
The presenter is pretty much reading word for word from
a deck of 40 slides, which are mostly densely worded,
bulleted items with an occasional chart or graph thrown
in.
You have no interest in the topic, and to keep from
falling asleep during the next 30 minutes, you are
taking this opportunity to proofread some documents for
a pressing deadline.
You realize you are missing about 75 percent of the
material — but you have all the slides on a handout to
refer to later if necessary. The meeting feels like a
complete waste of time and you have this important
deadline?
Okay, rewind: Consider this scenario instead. The
presenter has a deck of 10 slides. Three of the slides
are charts showing some really interesting relationships
of data. Two slides have images that seem to capture the
essence of the issue at hand, and the remaining slides
have a series of bulleted keywords.
These keywords give you a sense of the overall
organization of the presentation, helping you keep track
of what has been covered. They also seem to serve as a
roadmap that keeps the presenter on track of what to
cover next.
In this presentation, the slides aren’t everything.
In fact, some really interesting stories capture your
imagination and help you understand the material in a
very different way. Plus, the presenter is comfortable
with the material and speaks quite easily, almost
conversationally.
The screen is blank when the topic is not on a
slide. The handout, as announced at the beginning, comes
at the end of the presentation. Everyone in the meeting
seems engaged, and you actually find yourself interested
in what’s being discussed.
The PowerPoint presentation is ubiquitous and part
of the very fabric of how business is done. But why is
this? Why is it that the first thing anyone thinks about
when preparing for a presentation is to develop a slide
deck? Why is it that, if presenters don’t show up with a
deck of slides, they are looked at suspiciously? And why
do people keep insisting on showing slides when they
know how deadening it feels to sit through a
presentation that is entirely slide dependent?
So, imagine asking people to describe the best slide
show they’ve ever seen. They either explode with cynical
laughter and talk about a time when there was a
technical glitch and the presenter had to wing it
without slides, or they cite a particularly effective
picture, one that captured their imagination and
instantly conveyed the message much more powerfully than
words ever could.
Speakers use PowerPoint to organize their thinking
before a presentation, but the software is actually a
very clumsy tool for this purpose. There are far better
software tools to help you think through your talk, such
as Inspiration (www.inspiration.com), which lets you
easily map your thoughts and outline your ideas.
Presenters also fill their slides with way too much
information because they don’t want to forget anything.
A few select keywords are far more effective at helping
you remember what you want to cover, reminding your
audience about where you want to go and keeping them on
track with your talk.
People often design the slide show to be used as a
handout as well, but what is most effective as a handout
is often very different from what will support the
audience in understanding the message during a talk.
Why not prepare two separate packages? One is a
slide show that enhances the messages of your
presentation. The other is a document that people take
with them.
Don’t misunderstand. There are very powerful and
effective ways to support a talk visually through the
use of software like PowerPoint. But it should be played
like a fine instrument, with subtlety and finesse,
rather than used as a club to be applied to every aspect
of the presentation.
The next time you are putting together a slide show,
ask yourself these questions about each slide.
Is this slide for me or for my audience?
Will it really help them better understand my
message or just serve as a distraction?
How can I remember what I’m going to say without
putting the entire text on the slide?
What can I do to simplify the slide so that only
essential information is displayed?
What do I really need to do at this point in the
presentation to engage the audience and enhance my
message?
Is a visual the best way to convey the information
or could a story do a better job?
Using ideas like this, your talk will be much
stronger and your audience will be engaged and awake.
All rights
reserved
Carla Kimball is president of RiverWays
Enterprises, a public speaking training company in
Cambridge. She is a public speaking coach specializing
in helping people develop a confident and authentic
leadership presence and works extensively with business
professionals.
Blog: Musings on Speaking with Confidence and
Presence:
http://riverways.typepad.com/speaking_presence/
Website:
http://riverways.com/
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