The Three Slide Rule
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
Without writing my own tome (which would obviously be flawed), I'll simply implore you to consider the following question when putting your presentation together: Are you trying to teach or to persuade?
If persuading, keeping it entirely verbal may be effective (if you are good at such things). However, if teaching, most evidence points to opening up as many sensory channels as possible to get the information across. Usually, that means verbal and visual.
The most important thing is to structure your talk so that the audience's mind is engaged. A simple trick to help is to ask questions (even if rhetorically), then reveal the answer.
In other words, it's how you use the slides, not whether you use the slides.
Same with pie charts, btw (the other offending article).
EDIT: emphasis
On the other hand, when teaching anything with a conceptual framework (that is, not just showing people how to install Wordpress), it's good to show not only the result, or examples of "truth," but also counterexamples. It's often useful to help define a concept by also saying what it is not. You want people to see all of the evidence and to be able to provide their own reasons as to the conclusion. You are clear, open, and even emphatic about assumptions or limiting conditions (at least to the point where it causes no harm to leave out and would only increase confusion if included).
If you happen to be so lucky as to have a room full of people who all share the same conceptual framework and vocabulary, then standing up and telling a story can also be an effective teaching tool. Mostly, however, we are being introduced to the vocabulary as we are being taught, and multiple channels of reinforcement are very helpful.
But if you've been asked to research a set of options for viability, for example, things are different. You'll need bullet-points with highlights, tables with totals, and conclusions that summarize the main differences. Such things are very well presented with slides. I believe that this is the kind of stuff Powerpoint was originally invented for.
Similar stuff if I'm going to explain Coffeescript to a room full of C# programmers; I want examples, on slides.
There's probably more examples like these. The moment you want the audience to make up their own mind (which option do I prefer? do I want to use Coffeescript?), you need to present facts, not just a story. I strongly doubt just telling people how cool Coffeescript's => operator is will get the point across very well.
If my audience wants hard facts, I'm going to put it on slides, whether or not my CEO has a 3 slide rule.
This intrigues me. How would you present summaries or pros/cons of options?
I'm talking e.g. a presentation that compares various web UI frameworks for a to-be-developed project that involved multiple parties / departments. Not the typical startup situation no, but common nonetheless.
Sometimes presenting every point on a separate slide works quite well - never done it myself, but I have seen some good presentations where this technique was used. I guess this could become quite annoying when overused. But it might work for comparisons: One slide for every aspect that is compared.
You could also prepare a separate handout that contains the detailed pros/cons or comparisons and keep the slides minimalistic.
Even then, the approach taken by Lawrence Lessig (hundreds of slides, very rythmic), makes the point across. Yet the slides alone are worth nothing without the presenter.
The biggest mistake is to think that the slides contain the message, a mistake often shared both by the presenter and the audience. How many times have I heard "can we get a copy of those slides?". If I ever hear this question it means I have failed as a presenter.
It's useless and missing the point to ask for the slides. Slides are not the vector of the argument, you – the presenter – are; Slides are merely here to outline the point.
Nobody reads the bullets and listen to you at the same time. Nobody will read those tables projected on that small screen at a jittery resolution. It could be bogus data and no one would care yet their mind will focus on it instead of what you say. You built a table to compute a total, so only the total matters. Guess what? Just show the total. Your discourse will expose what the bullets say, your discourse will sum up what's in the tables. Then you nail it by showing the total slide. If people do want the table to check values then its place is not in the slides, it's in a report. A document with content that you hopefully provide when it matters. Slides on the opposite should basically have a very low content ratio in contrast with your speech, or people will simply be distracted from you and read. Worse, they will unconsciously wonder why they're here listening to you when they could just as well read the content by themselves, and end up getting bored.
(ok this could mean you totally crapped out, but I guess you could tell the difference)
As dhimes points out, teaching is different than persuading. If I'm going to teach something, I need figures. Words alone are not enough. In high school and college, my teachers would fill black-boards with figures and equations while they explained things. The first thing my intro to physics professors would always do is draw a picture. That's what I'm doing, except I don't draw my figures one-the-fly as they did. Think about when you first learned the various sorting algorithms. Would you have understood them without watching someone work through examples, moving numbers around as the algorithm progressed? This is very much the same thing.
As for performance results, I need to show multiple graphs that test various aspects of the system to give the audience the impression that everything works as advertised. (Just an impression is enough - they'll read the full paper if they're interested in being thoroughly convinced.) Just showing the graphs isn't enough, of course. I always take the time to explain what the experiment was in the first place, what the axes are, what each plotted line means, and which direction is "good" (for example, if it's scale-up, high is "good"). Finally, in case none of that sinks in, I explicitly tell them, "What we learned from this graph is: ___."
These things are probably going to require more than three slides.
As for Powerpoint and Keynote, reserve those for actual presentations (i.e., delivered live in front of an audience). Try to avoid them as handouts or passed-around documents, unless requested by the recipient (And even then, politely push back if possible; most people have been conditioned to ask for PPTs when they don't really need, or even want them).
This is just my experience, and admittedly is largely limited to the academic world, but when someone stands up and has a table with five columns, five rows, and numbers to eight significant figures I immediately switch off!
Like any other story it should be engaging, interesting, fun and memorable. It should also have a beginning and an end. If you think of your slides in this context things change. Their goal is to amplify your point, make a technical point clearer, or something Else to underline what you're saying. The main focus should be the speaker, not the slides.
If you want to see a true Master look at some of Steve Jobs keynotes. There are three kind of slides:
- pictures to show what the product looks like.
- short bullets to give an overview (a phone, an iPod, an internet communications device)
- simple graphs to show a point or a trend.
Not always. For instance, a scientist gives oral presentations at conferences, and goes to see oral presentations by others, because verbal communication with visual aids is a more effective form of communication than written. I can get a better idea of what someone else is doing by having them explain it to me for ten minutes than by spending ten minutes reading their words on paper... even though I can read words far faster than they can speak 'em.
I hate being overwhelmed by slides, so I've tried adapting some of these sorts of techniques to scientific talks, but I just can't. I'm not selling something, I'm trying to communicate huge slabs of information in limited time. A talk with visual aids has a greater information bandwidth than one without.
Besides, redundant text on your slides is an important insurance policy, to make sure you don't forget to say something. If you've got time to practice your talk over and over then this isn't important, but if you write your slides two days before the talk and practice it once in your hotel room then they're helpful.
You end up in the worst of both worlds: a presentation where the presenter is nearly irrelevant (I can read slides too) and notes that are spread across too many slides to be useful.
It takes extra work, but developing one slide set for presentation and another set of materials (not necessarily slides) for reference works 1000x better.
'Words' and 'Expressions' along with a meaningful message are the best ways to communicate yourself across to a room full of people. Some visual material is as much important but only 'useful' material.
Rather than wasting your time on thinking 'how to fill N number of slides', it will be a lot more useful if we know our material, practice our material and choose our words carefully. Practice how to engage audience, than trying to make awesome visuals to enchant them with your slide making skills.
Why 'three slide' rule?
Lets make it a 'one' slide rule! :)
More generally, I strongly believe that slides are only here as an illustration of what I say, they shouldn't be that useful without me talking in front of them.
As an example, here is a slide deck I used for a talk I gave at the MIT a few months back: http://vimeo.com/24471964
I had a large client where I was doing a lot of Agile training. As part of that, I created a series of workshops around putting together a backlog when starting a project. There was no text -- it was simply pictures and me telling a story with them.
Two very interesting things happened. First, the students loved it. I'd talk/present for ten minutes or so, then we'd do stuff. Repeat and rinse. There was never a big wall of text for them to absorb, and I never read from anything. They were always doing stuff. And since it was stuff related to their specific project, even better.
The second thing was completely unexpected. The customer had a very mixed response to my material! It seems that they wanted something with a lot of text so that they could "teach" it themselves. A narrative, story-focused presentation that was integrated into the team's work was simply too difficult. They wanted a presentation that read like a textbook.
As far as being a good consultant goes, I'm not sure if I did a good thing or a bad thing in terms of the customer's long-term goals. But as far as the people I'm helping? I'm sticking to pictures and stories. Nobody wants to live through another Powerpoint hell, and I have no desire to put anybody through it again.
Part of this book is freely available, discussing the involvement of PowerPoint in the Columbia disaster:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
The entire book is short, and only $7 from the author:
The best presentation I ever did followed these steps:
1. Type out everything you want to say. Learn it. It should be easy to learn because you should know your subject.
2. Type out prompts as bullet points for each point your need to get across. Learn them, you should only refer to them if you absolutely need to.
3. Use slides to illustrate your point. You should NEVER be reading directly from or using slides as prompts.
You are the presentation, not the slides.
A presentation should be balanced between content and visuals. Content should be presented in a manner supported by visuals. You liked the graph because it was essential and supporting the information being transmitted to you.
Also, filling a presentation with unnecessary information and talk would turn the audience off and bore them.
So stopping and thinking before doing any writing down or creating any slides is good behaviour leading good presentations.
Isn't that the standard operating procedure?