Presentation Zen [22]
Projected slides should be as visual as possible and support your points quickly, efficiently, and powerfully. The verbal content, the verbal proof, evidence, and appeal/emotion come mostly from your spoken word. But your handouts (takeaway documents) are completely different. You aren’t there to supply the verbal content and answer questions so you must write in a way that provides at least as much depth and scope as your live presentation. Often, however, even more depth and background information is appropriate since people can read much faster than you can speak. Sometimes, the presentation is on material found in the speaker’s book or a long journal article. In that case, the handout can be quite concise; the book or research paper is where people can go to learn more.
Do Conferences Encourage Slideumentation?
Proof that we live in a world dominated by “bad PowerPoint”—many conferences today require speakers to follow uniform PowerPoint guidelines and submit their PowerPoint files far in advance of the conference. The conference now takes these “standardized PowerPoints” and prints them in a large conference binder or includes them in the conference DVD for attendees to take home. What the conference organizers are implying is that a cryptic series of slides featuring bullet points and titles makes for both good visual support in your live presentation and for credible documentation of your presentation content long after your talk has ended. This forces the conference speaker into a catch-22 situation. The presenter must say to herself: “Do I design visuals that clearly support my live talk or do I create slides that more resemble a document to be read later?” Most presenters compromise and shoot for the middle, resulting in poor supporting visuals for the live talk and a series of document-like slides filled with text and other data that do not read well (and are therefore not read). These pseudo-documents do not read well because a series of small boxes with text and images on sheets of paper do not a document make.
The slideument isn’t effective, and it isn’t efficient, and it isn’t pretty. Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, prove your point, and engage your audience. PowerPoint and Keynote are not good tools, however, for making written documents—that’s what word processors are for.
Why don’t conference organizers request that speakers instead send a written document (with a specified maximum page length) that covers the main points of their presentation with appropriate detail and depth? A Word or PDF document that is written in a concise and readable fashion with a bibliography and links to even more detail, for those who are interested, would be far more effective. When I get back home from the conference, do organizers really think I’m going to attempt to read pages full of PowerPoint slides? One does not read a printout of someone’s two-month old PowerPoint deck, one guesses, decodes, and attempts to glean meaning from the series of low-resolution titles, bullets, charts, and clip art. At least they do that for a while… until they give up. With a written document, however, there is no reason for shallowness or ambiguity (assuming one writes well).
To be different and effective, use a well-written, detailed document for your handout and well-designed, simple, intelligent graphics for your visuals. Now that would be atypical. And while it may be more effort on your part, the quality of your visuals and takeaway documents will be dramatically improved. This may not be the easiest solution, but it seems quite simple, straightforward, and clear. It is the simplest.
Avoiding