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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

i think i remebered an arstechnica article (was it that? i dont remember) that explained in simple terms how jobs does keynote better. they explained stuff like "just write in as few words as possible your topic and speak. if you wrote a paragraph on screen, why would anyone hear you repeat that?" and other stuff like using a plain background instead of fancy things.

i would love to revisit that but sadly i have been unable to find it

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There was an entire book on Jobs' presentations called Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo. Perhaps Ars wrote a review and summarized some of the top points?

Guy Kawasaki has also written quite a bit about effective presentations and has a 10/20/30 rule. Ten slides, twenty minutes, 30 point font. The idea of putting as few words as possible on a slide sounds like a Kawasaki thing.

Watching yesterday’s keynote, I couldn’t help but notice the “homogenized diversity” that’s become a mainstay of Apple’s post-COVID product announcements. Even though there were folks from all cultures (which is great), their hand gestures and word emphasis were unusually uniform.

I’d love to see a glimpse of the presentation skills class they probably have through Apple University.

I remember a lesson from years ago about presentations, this was in a military context, that either you can do the talking or the slides can do the talking. Pick one, don't try to do both.

I once read somewhere that we only have one language center in the brain, and thus can't read and listen simultaneously, so those text-laden slides basically do nothing but provide a distraction; you're alternating between listening and reading, there is no such thing as doing them both at once.

There may be some room for providing illustrations, but bullet point presentations really do far more harm than good.

It depends on the purpose of the presentation.

A marketing slide or a visual aide to a speech should be as light in prose as possible. But it is valid to use slides as primary information delivery mechanisms with the speech as a complement.

Right, but since you can't actually listen to the speech as you read the slides (or read the slides as you listen to the speech), then the slides really should be a complementary booklet or some other written text intended to be read at a different time.

Shhh, if you point that out, people will start questioning whether they need a slide presentation at all.

I tend to view 'no aids' as the default; unless I can come up with a specific use for a slide deck, why make one?

Slides are perfectly fine and readable if you only talk about content on the slide. Just make simple bullet points that are reiterated in your speech and keep it on topic

Very much so.

I just designed a presentation for a Zoom talk I'm doing, and its intended use case is not only that I'll be going through it during the talk, but that printouts will be available, and the handout/resource will be available digitally perpetually.

Since the presentation involves complex, easily confused topics (voting research), being very specific is necessary in this case.

Marketing a product or making an argument require different types of presentations than teaching. Each can be done well or poorly.

Have you considered putting the text in the slide notes, rather than in the slides themselves?

I actually sent it to them both ways (I just consider it basic good practice since I have a background in accessibility; presentation + some form of 'just text' is my default)!

Which is fun, because there's notes and then True Notes(TM) with all my terrible jokes.

One benefit of slides that largely duplicate the same content that was in the talk is that if they are made publicly available, then you can go back over them if you forget/weren't there/learn better through reading/etc. Of course, the same is true for transcripts, but noone makes transcripts and everyone makes slides.

I've met at least two people in my lifetime who had 2 or 3 language processors in their brain. They could type unrelated sentences while listening/speaking in a different conversation.

That's not me, though - I can't even finish typing a word I've thought of if I'm trying to listen to someone talk or say something to them at the same time. I have 1 language processor at the best of times.

This is how you do presentations if you're someone that spent some time learning how to do presentations. It doesn't take Steve Jobs. The better lecturers know that.

The thing about writing as few words as possible on the slide isn't unique to Jobs. I've been teaching that to my students for 20 years or more. I got it from a book( well, more like a booklet. it is really thin with tons of pictures) called Save Our Slides.

I remember sitting in a short session at a small UK university, about presenting, in 2002. The main message was to keep the audience's attention on you, not the screen. In many ways it was stating the obvious, but it's true that few people ever stop and reason about these things.

To this day, the few tips I picked up in that silly little session still make me a much better presenter and slide-maker than 99% of my colleagues, hands down, and I'm really not bragging.

> writing as few words as possible on the slide

that's something I learned at university, though I don't remember if it was explicitly told in class or something I picked up when preparing presentations

That's standard presentation skill, actually.

Slides are not a text document, they are a visual aide.

I think this works effectively in many situations (particularly keynotes), but I frequently give presentations that are (1) meant to inform more than persuade or entertain, (2) are often given to an audience with a substantial fraction of non native English speakers, and (3) the slides are regularly distributed after the fact. This pretty much necessitates having texty slides that I have to read more or less verbatim, even if that makes the experience more dull.

https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd... Is worth reading in a similar vein - Death by PowerPoint.

This is also covered in Jobs's biography (which is a great read btw).

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