Too Much Text!
This is a guest post contributed by Rick Altman, a world-renowned presentation consultant, PowerPoint expert, author, and the organizer of PowerPoint Live.
It is rare in modern-day business presentations to see a problem or difficulty that isn’t in some way caused by an overabundance of projected text. Just off the top of my head...
- Speaker reading the slides
- Audience tuning out and/or developing eye fatigue
- Lack of emotion or energy in room
- No real connection created between speaker and audience
All of these pitfalls usually boil down to slides that try too hard, that compete for attention, and that become distractions. Here are the four typical reasons why you as the presenter might make this mistake and how you can best avoid it in the future:
1. You Do Not Know Any Better
In the first installment of this series, we spoke of the multitude of PowerPoint users whose bridge to the software was their proficiency with other Office applications. If you come from Word and you are new to PowerPoint, you don’t know that writing out an entire document in PowerPoint is the wrong thing to do. It might seem like a perfectly logical way to prepare: write down what you want to say and then say it. And hey, there’s this software program that will show you everything that you’ve written down, so your audience can see it, too.
Of the four problem areas we define here, this one is the easiest to address: You learn the fundamentals of good presentation design. You have no bad habits yet and few preconceived notions. You’re just green. You just need to buy a good book...
2. You Are Addicted
This problem is not so easy to solve and in our line of work, we see it all the time: the presenters who feels as if they cannot function unless fully-formed thoughts are on each slide. While this usually finds its roots in the 47-minute syndrome discussed in the first installment (this is how they learned to use PowerPoint and they never questioned it or tried anything different), if you suffer from this, it has grown into a crutch without which you believe you cannot stand.
No question about it, one of today’s most acute pain points is when speakers use their slides as notes. It leads to the first three universal axioms that we will put forth across this series:
If a slide contains complete sentences, it is practically impossible for even the most accomplished presenters to avoid reading the entire slide word for word.
Watch for it the next time you attend a presentation: the more verbiage a slide contains, the more likely is the speaker to read all of it. This axiom leads directly into a second one:
When you read your slides word for word, you sound like an idiot.
This addiction needs to be kicked cold turkey: You need to force yourself to parse your bullets to the absolute bare minimum and then try speaking to them. At first, you might feel naked out there without your comfortable safety net, but in our experience, by the second time, you will begin to feel comfortable without the security blanket of all that text, and by the third time, you will thrive.
So many good things happen when you weed-whack your text, but above all, now there is the likelihood that the real person inside of you might come out, as opposed to the drone who was reading those slides before. Now your audience might really have an opportunity to engage with your ideas and feel the weight of your message. Once you get out from under your slides, you take the first step toward truly connecting with your audience on a level other than the intellectual. As presenters, that is our promised land.
3. You Are Trying to Create Leave-Behinds
How many times have you been to a presentation in which the speaker printed out his or her slides and delivered them as notes? How many times have you done this? In my opinion, this fails every time. In 15 years as a presentation consultant, I have never once seen a single slide deck function successfully as printed material and projected content. Not once!
There is just no free lunch here: If you prepare your slide deck properly, with engaging visuals and minimal text, it would be inadequate as supplemental documentation to your presentation. If you create fully-fleshed-out documentation that would be well-suited for printouts and you project them as your slide content...instant Death by PowerPoint.
This is a tough one, because I know that the unavoidable conclusion here is extra work for you. You must create two documents to do it right. With slide deck deadlines that are routinely “yesterday,” this is a tough pill to swallow and I have no illusions to the contrary. I refer you to our current Article of the Month for tangible and specific solutions to this dilemma.
4. You Are Required to
I see this more and more in my travels as a consultant: the presenter who feels compelled or is literally required to display and say out loud a lengthy passage of text. An annual shareholders meeting...a proposal at a city council meeting...safety guidelines for visitors at a public gathering...these often carry legal or fiduciary requirements.
But we have already established the high fire danger of displaying lengthy content and then reciting it off the screen. So what do you do?
The recipe for success here is the order in which you do things:
- Offer up the most minimal bullet points for the required passage.
- Recite the entirety of your required message.
- Then display the entirety of your required message.
Doing it this way resonates at a profoundly different frequency; now you’re not a drone, you’re omniscient! Say it first...display it second—that makes all the difference in the world when you are faced with this type of requirement in a public presentation.
Please take from this article one simple conclusion: Less text on your slides!
Make sure you read Rick Altman's next article "Thriving with Animation!"
