One of the worst mistakes I see presenters make is the misuse of PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint was conceived as ‘presenter support’. It is designed to portray text and images that reinforce the presenter’s key points. However, many presenters fall into the trap of treating presentation slides as documents rather than a presentation support tool. This has been labelled the ‘presentation as document’ syndrome by Jerry Weismann in his excellent book ‘Presenting to Win’.

If you have spent anytime in a working environment, you are likely to have seen this syndrome in for yourself. You turn up to a presentation, sit down and then the presenter displays his first slide. It’s packed full of text – sentences and even paragraphs. You read the whole slide in maybe twenty seconds and absorb the information. However, the presenter can’t keep up with your reading and he proceeds to read the content of the slides out loud. It’s no surprise that most audiences soon switch off when presenters use this approach. Lets face it, if you are going to use your slides in this way, then you may as well send round a word document for the audience to read rather than turn up and present.

Your role as a presenter is to enthuse the audience, to make the subject interesting and to get your point across. To keep your audience engaged use PowerPoint for its real purpose – to support your key points. A useful analogy is the TV news. The text, headlines and images on the TV pick out the key points of the anchors presentation whilst she gives more detail verbally. Think of your slides in the same way by using text and graphics carefully and only where necessary to support your message. Some slides may require a graph, others may warrant some bullet points and on other occasions an image can fill a slide. If you do use bullet points, and most presenters need to at some point, then consider using the transition settings to build them up one by one. If you show four bullet points at once and then start to talk around the first one, the audience will have started reading the others before you reach them.

Most people who suffer from the ‘presentation as document’ syndrome do so because they are nervous or believe that they will not remember their key points. The answer to these concerns is to prepare and rehearse instead of relying on your slides as a ‘crutch’ or reminder tool. By using slides for their real purpose you can improve as a presenter and get your message across and avoid sending you audience to sleep. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Delivery, Audience, Equipment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.