Again today, someone told me a sad story about poor presenting and too many slides. It’s an annual meeting where 15 speakers each speak for an hour (a 2-day meeting) and bore everyone with their content, their delivery and their slides. It’s not that hard to be interesting–if you’d just think about it with your logical mind and from the point of view of your audience. Get out of your own way and stop worrying about looking good. Focus on helping your audience and on making it easy for them to pay attention. And as your audiences get younger, they’re less bothered about needing to appear polite. They’ve been conditioned–perhaps by their parents, certainly by ever-present technology and media to just tune you out if you’re not capturing their attention.
When you use slides, have a better reason for using them than that everyone else is using them. And, if you’re using them for your notes you’re not fooling anyone. You’ll put too much on them and then be attached to them because you’re afraid you’ll leave something out. And now you’ve lost your connection with your audience.
Design them to help your audience and they’ll be more interesting, plus, they’ll help you, too. Too much information on slides distracts you and the audience. And too many slides overwhelms. These are supposed to be visual aids. Aids. Not your presentation.
Keep them to a minimum. Not more than one slide for every two minutes is good. Not more than ten an hour is even better.
Work on interacting with your audience, engaging them, and only use the slides that will help make that happen.
