Ladies and gentlemen, PowerPoint is being used every day, everywhere, by a lot of people, in different ways.
But all presentations can be split up in 2 major use cases; I will present you the two options, and then feel free to use whichever you like better.
(1) A visual aid to improve you presentations
or
(2) A way to torture your audience
I’m sure you’ve seen both. I don’t know what the audience did wrong, but some presenters do torture their audience with incredibly long and boring presentations. And they are so bad, so incredibly bad, that there was term invented for them: death by PowerPoint.
So here is the recipe if you want to torture your audience with PowerPoint:
- Long Boring Slides
- Bad
- Content-free
Moreover, put a lot of text on the slides, in small fonts and read from your presentation loud.
Why is this wrong?
It’s wrong because each and every one of us can read by ourselves. Actually I can read much faster and understand than one can read loudly… so it’s useless to read from your slides.
Slides are NOT for YOU AS A PRESENTER, to read from them, to make your life easier and have less to explain and present …NO NO NO …
They are to help your audience remember your message and your presentation. And if they get bored, they might remember YOU and that YOU had a horrible PPT, and that’s all. No message delivered.
How to do it better?
You need to organize your oral presentation…
-Introduction
-3-4 arguments
-Conclusion
And you need to rehears your oral presentation.
And you can use the PowerPoint slides as a visual aid to deliver your message. PowerPoint can be a very powerful tool that can add impact and variety, but it is no substitute for being a good communicator.
Remember, less is better. You need to have 1 idea/ slide and use some key words and meaningful pictures. It’s not in vain that they say that a picture is worth 1000 words. Besides, humans are visual beings, we remember mostly from what we see and less from what we hear. And for the rest, you do the talking. (If you need to send the PPT to someone who does not attend your presentation, write notes to the slide, or even feel free to write an additional document. But don’t put all the info on the slides.)
I will not present you a guideline how to make a presentation; if you think about it, you know a lot of things, and you can always and get helpful tips and information.
What I want from you is that you to ask yourself, before making a presentation, what do you want your presentation to be? Do you want to torture your audience or not?
Do you want your presentation to be part of the 95% that suck? Or do you want it to be part of the 5% that actually use the slides as genuine visual aids?
Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours!! What will you choose?
Discurs susținut în cadrul unei întalniri Timișoara Toastmasters de către
Andreea Cosma
