Presentations
You know that time you sat through a presentation and the presenter basically read off the information from the slides to you with brief side thoughts. Do you know what is worse than that? Sitting through multiple people doing this.
Why does this happen, you ask? I would hazard a guess: people don’t understand what presentation software is for. I will give you a hint for what it is not; it is not for throwing your notes up behind you. It does not substitute for handing out an outline to the audience. I don’t want to read your notes while you say them to me. This makes you redundant and unnecessary.
Presentation software is designed to give you the ability to show me what you are talking about. Don’t just regurgitate your outline, illustrate what you want to say. Show me a picture. Show me a diagram. Show me text that adds and reenforces what you’re saying. The slides are not your presentation, they are the supplemental info for it. They help your audience understand what you’re saying, not to get between you and the audience.
There are some good sets of rules that can help make presentations better, but these are largely pointless if you don’t understand the role of visualizations during a speech. Please, for the sake of those people you will present to in the future, do not read your slides to them. Say what you want to say and let the slides illustrate and clarify what you say.
