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Comment by calmoo | Hacker News Reader

I watched this years ago and really enjoyed it. One of the main lessons I took from it is basically, have almost 0 text on your slides. You should not be reading your slides, the audience should not have to read your slides. The slides should supplement what you are speaking about, not vice versa.

Any time I see a wall of text on a presentation, I know I can probably tune out and not miss much.

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This is great advice for the right context, but can be the wrong advice for different situations.

If the slide deck is meant to be something that can be shared around and make sense without you, it needs to have a lot of text on the slides. Even putting it in the speaker notes doesn’t work.

So make sure you know your audience and the context (also important presentation advice)

This is a case for their being two slide decks. Or rather, that slides can be used as a shareable graphic-heavy document OR as an aid to giving a talk, but the same deck can’t be good at both purposes at the same time.

Sounds better in theory than in practice. Making two separate slide decks and then hopping everything makes sense when you share one after people expect the other isn’t good.

If you have to serve both uses, text goes on the slides. If you’re primarily speaking then just include the speaker notes and hope it makes sense. If the slides will be shared primarily, text goes on the slides and you just deal with it while presenting.

Guys.

Slide decks have a "NOTES" view.

Put pretty pictures in the REAL view.

Share it and they will read the NOTES view.

Duh.

> If the slide deck is meant to be something that can be shared around and make sense without you, it needs to have a lot of text on the slides.

Then isn't that just a document? Why use a slide deck?

Yes, but then your audience doesn't need you to give the talk.

Counter examples:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161223041152/https://idlewords...

https://boringtechnology.club/

Those talks don’t have too much text on slides, yet they can still be shared as text by including the speaker’s script aligned with each slide. They also have online video versions for comparison.

If you need to share the idea of the talk using just the slides then that’s a totally different problem. You shouldn’t make the slides worse for people who can attend the talk.

Use skippable slides with the supplementary content?

One downside to not having much text on your slides is that the slides alone are then not as useful as a reference to attendees later.

When I do low-text slides anyway, sometimes I've used the "notes" field of the presentation program to write out complete text of a version of the speech, for my eyes only. Then I don't read the notes while presenting, but I've gone through that writing exercise, to think through the content and presentation more rigorously than is necessary to slap some headings on slides.

People have many options if they missed the talk. Read the transcript along with the slides, watch the talk recording, have ai summarize the talk...

I'd rather the talk was interesting and entertaining for the audience than present a slide deck of bullet points

> have almost 0 text on your slides

I don't think this is good advice. What you should actually do is not just read out the slide. The slide isn't your autocue.

It's fine to have text on a slide if you are talking about that text. For example you might be analysing some code, or writing techniques or whatever.

Honestly it's really obvious if you've ever watched any presentations in your life... but people still do it because it feels a lot easier.

If you're analyzing a code snippet, sure, makes sense. But have bullet points of long sentences is just serving to distract the audience from what you're saying.

Someone told me something similar once:

When giving a talk, your slides are not "the show." YOU are the show.

But I don't wanna be the show. :(

I think it’s the story that’s the show. Not the slides not only the storyteller.

But also the storyteller and also the slides.

Every TED speaker is coached to start with a personal story.

Then why are you giving a talk?

They are making me do it

At 27:50, he relays a story about a grad student who did an experiment to see what the audience retained better: the slides, or the presenter's words. It seems the slides won out. So apparently the slides are the star of the show, whether you like it or not.

But if the slides are very sparse, it make YOU the star of the show.

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