How getting in the beam makes you a better presenter

Public speaking and presenting are full of silly rules. One such silly rule is that you shouldn’t walk into into the beam of the projector. I disagree – it can be incredibly effective to get in the beam.

Why you should get in the beam

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Here’s a quick way to make over a bullet-point slide

It’s called the Assertion-Evidence Format and it was developed by Professor Michael Alley (I’ve mentioned it previously but somehow never devoted a whole post to it).

BTW, if you’ve downloaded and read my Presentation Planning Guide, you’ll see that this slide format dovetails nicely with the planning system I describe in the Guide.

First let’s look at the Assertion part of the format. [Read more]

The Top 7 PowerPoint slide designs

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

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PowerPoint slide design – adding elegance

In my last post, I gave some basic advice on PowerPoint slide design. Now let’s add some elegance.

1. When you add text to a photo, make sure it is easy to read. You can add a mask (a rectangle of partly transparent colour) between the text and the photo. In the example below right the transparency is on a gradient so that it fades seamlessly into the photo.

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PowerPoint slide design – the basics

I am not a designer. I was awakened to the possibility of improving the design of my PowerPoint slides by the Presentation Zen blog. Since then I have observed and analyzed examples of good design, even read some design books – and of course read the Presentation Zen book.

These design tips are not for bullet-point slides. I’m assuming you’re beyond that (if not start reading Presentation Zen).

These design tips are for the Assertion-Evidence format – this is gaining ground as the brain-friendly yet easy to put together alternative to bullets. The assertion-evidence slide format was developed by Professor Michael Alley. At the top of the slide is the assertion – a simple sentence which expresses the message of the slide. The rest of the slide is the evidence to support that assertion – expressed in a visual way. Ellen Finkelstein calls it the Tell ‘n’ Show slide format. Dave Paradi is using the format for his excellent slide make-overs.

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The myth of learning styles

Many presenters have heard about learning styles and want to know how they can take individual learning styles into account when they present. But the learning styles model has no research that backs it up:

“from a neuroscientific point of view [the learning styles approach to teaching] is nonsense”. (Susan Greenfield, specialist in brain physiology, quoted in The Times Educational Supplement, 27 July 2007).

But it still sticks around. Today I was a participant on a course where I was subjected to a “learning styles” test. Here’s just one example.  I was asked when buying a gift did I prefer to buy: [Read more]

Don’t forget the word-pictures

Many of my previous posts have been about adding a visual element to your presentations. But you don’t have to do this literally – you can also do it by triggering images in the minds of your audience.

I first learnt this about 15 years ago when I was presenting with an overhead projector. I was telling a story about elephants. It was about how a baby elephant is trained by chaining it to a post that it can’t pull out. It strains against the post but to no avail. Eventually the baby elephant resigns itself to being chained to the post. As it grows older, it develops the strength to pull out the post – but it has the limiting belief that it can’t pull it out – so it never tries.

Half-way through the story I put a cute line-drawing of a baby elephant on the overhead. An audience-member came up to me at the end and told me that the picture of the baby elephant had spoiled it for her – because up till then she had had a picture of a real elephant in her head.

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Make your pictures concrete too

The more concrete and specific you make your words, the more persuasive you will be to your audience. The same applies to the pictures you show. Recent research backs this up. Students were given short fictional news stories to read:

One story claimed that watching TV was linked to maths ability, based on the fact that both TV viewing and maths activate the temporal love [of the brain]. Crucially students rated these stories to be more scientifically sound when they were accompanied by a brain image, compared with when the equivalent data were presented in a bar chart, or when there was no graphical illustration at all.

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Use words and visuals

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.