Greetings!
In the days before anesthetics, soldiers bit
on bullets to help them endure pain. Modern
medicine has sent the term "bite the bullet"
into metaphor. If you have sat through
poorly-prepared presentations in meetings or
customer reviews, you'll understand this
metaphor (which now is equivalent to "Bring
out the Blackberry®").
Powerpoint® doesn't kill presentations;
people using Powerpoint (PP) kill
presentations. Effective slides present both
verbal and visual information concisely,
clearly, and powerfully. The medium is
ideally suited to create a synergy between
verbal and visual elements. Shoveling Word or
Excel documents into slides simply does not work.
In this article, we'll cover five verbal
principles that can help guide your
development of effective slides; my next
newsletter will present five similar visual
principles.
1. Create a story
Good communicators tell stories. A simple
formula for stories in business and technical
communication is:
Let's say you are proposing a security
upgrade. Tell the story of a former employee
found talking to employees in the clean room
(the "what?"). The "so what?" is that your
department is about to undergo a quality
audit, and this breach could hurt your
results. "Now what?" Now you argue for
security upgrades. Your story has made your
point.
2. Organize your thoughts
Psychologists tell us that the human brain
may generate 50,000 thoughts a day. My
thoughts are certainly random, so I never sit
down at the computer and create any written
document, let alone a PP slide show, without
first brainstorming my randomness onto paper,
then organizing my ideas with an outline.
Only then will I fire up the computer.
Throughout the process of creating slides, I
will constantly test my organization and move
ideas around as logic dictates.
3. Show your organization
PP provides several levels of organization.
The title slide announces your main topic;
each slide after that has a slide title for
subtopics; bullet and subbullet points
provide your third and fourth levels of
organization. Help your reader or listener
understand your logical organization by
broadcasting that logic. Take your outline
and fit it, wherever possible, into the slide
design.
4. Use six or fewer words in a bullet
point
Although your high school English teacher
would cringe at this advice, Avoid using
sentences in each bulleted line. Tighten your
text to six or fewer words. Strip out
redundancy: for example, "ATM machine" is
redundant, as the acronym stands for Automated
Teller Machine. And consider leaving out
articles like "the" and "a" and omitting
personal pronouns such as "you" as well as
prepositions.
Here's an example of tightening a bullet point:
Long version: Pick up election
supplies the
day before the
election is to take place (13
words)
Tightened version: Locate supplies 1 day
before election (6 words)
Shorter bulleted lines encourage you to use
the text as prompts or talking points.
Nothing kills a presentation
faster than a presenter's reading the
bullet points; "a fool with a tool is still a
fool.
(The number 6 may be a little arbitrary. Some
call for a maximum of 5 words; others
advocate 7 words. Six words per line seems
the best middle way to me.)
5. Use simple words where appropriate
Simpler words are best wherever possible in
all forms of writing, but especially in PP.
The word "use" expresses as much linguistic
information as the word "utilize," and it
fits better across the line. Of course,
if you need technical terms such as
"hemodiafiltration," you probably won't find
a simpler word. Nevertheless, using the
shorter word "help" rather than "accommodate"
elsewhere will keep your bullet points
shorter and cleaner (and the shorter word is
almost always easier to spell than the longer
word).
Practicing these principles as you create
your slide shows, along with the five visual
principles I'll share in the next newsletter,
will mean that you'll never have to apologize
to your viewers: "I know you can't see this,
but this is what it says."
