Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [26]
Get rid of those shady characters. Presentations are not ghost stories or film noir. Build your case with crystal clarity. Make it easy for your audiences, and they will make it easy for you; the alternative is not a pretty picture.
32. “I Can Read It Myself!”: Three Simple Steps to Avoid Reading Slides Verbatim
During the past 20 years, I have posed the same question to every one of the thousands of participants who have taken the Power Presentations program:
“How do you feel about presenters who read the words on their slides verbatim?”
I have also posed the same question to the countless businessmen and -women who have sat in the audiences of other people’s presentations. Not a single one of them has said that he or she likes the practice. Their responses, usually accompanied by facial expressions ranging from disdain to anger, usually take one of these variations:
“Why don’t you just email it to me?”
“Why bother?”
“I might as well do my email!”
“I’m not a child!”
And the most common response: “I can read it myself!”
The last reaction brings up a note of perspective: The first time anyone ever read to you was to put you to sleep, and thus you—and every man and woman in every audience you will ever face—are forever programmed.
The pervasive practice of reading slides verbatim has drawn derision in many quarters, including that of comedian Don McMillan’s YouTube video “How NOT to Use PowerPoint” (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB7S-KOJIfE).F32.1 But reading slides verbatim also raises a follow-up question: “If everyone finds the practice abhorrent, just who does it?” Is there a group of evil phantom presenters giving presentations a bad name?
The fact is, all presenters fall victim to this practice at one time or another and are just too embarrassed to admit it. They fall victim because of three even more pervasive practices:
• Use of the presentation as a document
• Lack of preparation and practice
• Text-heavy design
You read several solutions to counter each of these practices in earlier chapters—the most valuable of which is to minimize the verbiage on your slides and to maximize the use of pictorial images—but two additional solutions can help you avoid the dreaded reading verbatim trap:
If you do use bullets, treat them as headlines not sentences, and limit them to four or five words per line. Construct each line to begin with the same part of speech, preferably action verbs. This approach will make it virtually impossible for you to read verbatim.
When you present each bullet, paraphrase, use synonyms, or juxtapose the order of the words as you speak them. The audience will be able to extrapolate the meaning of the bullet without having to think, “I can read it myself!”
33. A Case for Case I: Initial Caps or All Caps: Text Design in Presentations
An article in the New York Times reported on a trend among major corporations to update their brand logos and noted that several of the companies—among them Wal-Mart, Kraft, Stop & Shop, and Cheer—have done so with “striking similarities.” One of the similarities is the conversion from all-caps to initial caps. The Times article described this shift as follows:
Toned-down type. Bold, block capital letters are out. Their replacements are mostly or entirely lower case, softening the stern voice of corporate authority to something more like an informal chat.
The article then went on to propose two reasons for the shift. First, the influence of email and text messaging which, like e.e. cummings’ poetry, is often composed in all lower case. Second, the long economic downturn has prompted a new look that is “non-threatening, reassuring, playful, even child-like. Not emblems of distant behemoths, but faces of friends.”F33.1
Should you make a similar shift in the text in your presentation graphics design? Perhaps, but first consider the different circumstances of each medium. A corporate logo is an inanimate object, regardless of the font, colors, or decorative ornaments used. The image sits inert on the product