This blog is called What NOT to do! Don’t make your slides text-heavy! The idea is to help you avoid all the common presentation skills mistakes people make when presenting in business.
The average slide has 50 words on it.
We know from the science of NLP that the conscious mind can only remember seven, plus or minus two.
That’s between 5 and 9 things.
That mean that at best your text-heavy slides are confusing, at worst they are actually stopping your audience from understanding your key messages.
It’s called cognitive overload.
What should you do instead?
1. Replace words with beautiful, memorable images. Remember a picture speaks a thousand words. You could use www.unsplash.com if you want free gorgeous images for your slides.
2. Eliminate bullet point slides. Turn three bullet points into three slides – each with a picture that bleeds to the edge of the screen. It will be much more memorable than three bullet points could ever be.
3. Use simple graphs and charts to display data. This may mean you need to create the graphs yourself rather than importing them from another document. Only reproduce the key information on graphs.
4. Use a yellow circle or a stylish build if you want the audience to focus on something on a busy slide. i.e. “You can see in the yellow circle that….”
5. Keep your fonts to a minimum of 30pt. If they are any smaller, the audience probably can’t read them.
6. Take all the file recovery details (you know, michellesfiles/admin/articleonslides!!!!) and page numbers off the bottom of the slide. These details are internal references that your audience doesn’t need to see. The detail-focused people spend time trying to read those tiny things on the bottom of your slides, so give them a break and take it off!
7. I’m often quoted as saying, “If they can’t see it, don’t show it!” Please remember my wise words!
Note: This might mean you have two copies of your information. One is the busy slide deck with lots of words, small graphs and charts, and many appendices; the other is the calm, clean version of your busy pack. It just shows the key points on the slide – the points you want your audience to remember.
Makes sense doesn’t it?
Happy Presenting!
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©2024 MICHELLE BOWDEN is an authority on persuasive presenting in business. She’s run her Persuasive Presentation Skills Masterclass over 1000 times for more than 13,000 people over the past 25 years and her name is a synonym for ‘presentation skills’ in Australia.
Michelle is a multi-million-dollar pitch coach to her client list that reads like a who’s who of international business: banking and finance, IT, pharmaceutical, retail, telecommunications plus many more. Michelle is the creator of the Persuasion Smart Profile®, a world-first psychological assessment tool that reports on your persuasive strengths and weaknesses at work, the best-selling internationally published author of How to Present: the ultimate guide to presenting live and online (Wiley) and How to Persuade: the skills you need to get what you want (Wiley).