How to Ruin a PowerPoint Presentation
What is the number one way to ruin a PowerPoint Presentation?
Use too many words!
Research shows that having lots of words on the screen to match a spoken presentation is not a good thing. It actually increases the cognitive load on the brain. What does that mean to you, the presenter? It means that your message actually becomes less clear to the audience. And, if there are a lot of words on the screen, there’s often a temptation for you, the speaker, to end up using the PowerPoint slides as a teleprompter. Again, not good. Much better to use notecards which are not seen by the audience.
What about bullet points? Aren’t bullet points good to emphasize a few points? A few points, yes, but, again, if you have too many points it can overwhelm your audience. Some suggest you should have no more than 6 bullet points. To go even further, some suggest you have no bullet points at all, but, rather have one key point per slide, along with interesting and relevant images.
Just remember, when it comes to using text in PowerPoint presentations, less is more.
Posted: November 11th, 2008 under Public Speaking Tips.
Tags: powerpoint presentation tips, Public Speaking Tips, using slides