Eat Like a Bird, Poop Like an Elephant
The other day, I wrote an article about how to have better meetings. One thing I didn’t mention in the article, and should have, was my love/hate relationship with MS PowerPoint.
PowerPoint is an incredibly powerful slideshow tool. The problem isn’t the software - it’s that people don’t know how to use it effectively. The typical slideshow is 57 slides of minuscule text with the occasional overly complicated graph or chart thrown in for good measure. Is this really your idea of a good presentation?
Today, I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned about how to give better presentations (and yes, I will explain the title of this article).
Don’t Read From the Slides
This has to got to be my number one all-time PowerPoint pet peeve… and something I’m horribly guilty of myself! This injustice to presentations isn’t the result of bad public speaking skills. It’s actually caused by the awful way in which we construct presentations in the first place.
People don’t think in bullets. They think in concepts and stories, and that’s the role that PowerPoint should play in your presentations. It’s simply the physical backdrop to the story you’re telling - not the story itself.
Drop the Bullets
I’m not a big fan of rules, but I do like philosophies and schools of thought. To that end, I’m not going to give you rules on how to improve your presentations. I’m going to give you guidelines. To some, I’m just speaking in semantics, but the point I’m trying to make is that you will occasionally have to break these guidelines, and I actively encourage you to do so (when appropriate).
If you want to instantly improve the quality of your presentations, I recommend these four, simple guidelines:
- Stop using bullets. Immediately. As in right now. (I understand how ironic this must look)
- Do not use anything smaller than size 30 font
- Include only one major thought or statement on screen at a time
- Graphics and one to four simple words should comprise the majority of your presentation
That’s it. Do those four things and your presentations will dramatically improve (as will the attention span of your audience).
So what do you do with the 17 bullet points that were on your slide? Move them to the notes section and talk about them. If the audience can just read them off the screen, what do they need you for? You could just email them the presentation!
Learn to Present from the Pros
I’ve given you the super compressed Cliffs Notes version of these concepts. If you really want to improve your presentation skills, learn from the pros.
I recommend you start by reading “How I made my presentations a little better,” by Merlin Mann over at 43Folders. If you have an hour to spare, this video by Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen is the best tutorial on presentations you will ever see (the reference to “Eat like a bird, poop like an elephant” happens in the first 10 minutes):
And if that’s not enough, watch Merlin’s take on Presentation Zen in a talk he gave to Google on keeping your inbox manageable.
What are your strategies for giving better presentations?
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