How to persuade other people to ditch the bullets
May 14, 2009
You’ve read Presentation Zen and Slideology and you’re convinced about the benefits of using visually-engaging PowerPoint slides when you present. But everyone else in your organization stubbornly sticks to the bullet-point slides. How can you persuade them to change their minds?
The absolute first thing to do, is to be a good role model. When you present, demonstrate the effectiveness of presenting with visual slides. This is the most persuasive action you can take.
However, it’s not always enough. There’s an obvious irony to the fact that when people are surveyed about presentations, their No 1 “hate” is people reading off bullet-point slides. Yet the majority of presenters probably read off bullet-point slides. I’m sure there’s an overlap between the two groups:
The Top 7 PowerPoint slide designs
January 6, 2009
The PowerPoint revolution has sparked the evolution of different styles of PowerPoint design. I’ve identified seven different styles to inspire you – do add others in the comments.
If you’re just getting started with creating non-bullet point slides, I recommend the assertion-evidence or PresentationZen style. Then start mixing and matching between styles to provide variety for your audience.
The assertion-evidence slide
New research: warning about story-telling
January 2, 2009
The guru of multimedia learning Richard Mayer has just published a new paper that all presenters should take note of. The paper is called “Increased interestingness of extraneous details in a multimedia science presentation leads to decreased learning”.
The research
Students received one of two PowerPoint presentations about how a cold virus infects the human body.
Both PowerPoint presentations included interesting but irrelevant details about viruses. In the first presentation the details were of high-interest eg: the role of viruses in sex and death. In the second presentation the details were of low-interest eg: health tips about viruses. [Read more]
Use words and visuals
April 26, 2008
I’m reading Dan Roam’s great new book Back of the Napkin. It’s led me to explore all the resources on the web for visual thinking. What I’m seeing is that there’s a whole movement out there for visual thinking, infographics etc. But yet most presenters, presentation trainers and consultants still think in terms of the verbal narrative of a presentation being the most important – and the visual side is just a visual aid.
Here’s another way of looking at it. Our audience can take things in, in two major ways: words and pictures. They correspond to the verbal channel and the visual channel of our brains (see Richard Mayer in Multimedia Learning). So in our presentations we should use both – without one being more important than the other.
