The other day, I went to a series of lectures given at a major university in the Bay Area. The speakers had miles of titles, books, and awards to their names, so you would expect to be blown away by their presentations. In all fairness, most presentations were indeed good, but one stood out, not because of its excellence, but because of the very bad PowerPoint slides that accompanied an otherwise good talk.
You know how in a lecture, you start counting how many times the lecturer says "um" in one sentence? Well, after reading the first slide of this presentation, I couldn’t help but focus on the writing on every slide that flashed in front of our eyes at rapid speed.
There were no commas, no colons, but 12–15 lines of text per slide, which he read - word for word - with his back to the audience. In addition, some of the text didn’t immediately make sense, as in: “the test is does party as thought of by pundits and other analysts mean Clinton will get his policies through Congress?”
Grammatical and vocabulary errors also detracted from his good delivery (overcome was "over come" and "these two phenomenon" appeared several times).
In complete contrast, 3 scientists gave a presentation about adult embryo versus fetal embryo research – a rather esoteric topic. They used only 10 slides, many with just one graphic and one explanation, but presented in a way that we, the lay audience, could follow and understand. The difference was that the presenters didn’t use their PPT slides as a crutch, they spoke freely and succinctly and left us intellectually satisfied.
OK, what does all of this mean for us? It means that for us to give an effective, good presentation in this educated Silicon Valley environment, we need to be clear, to the point and concise – verbally and in writing.
We have to know what we want to say, give our audiences something intellectually interesting, and let them walk away with something of value.
We have to speak in a language that all audiences not only understand, but also want to hear. Or, as Peggy Noonan (a major speech writer for major presidents) said in On Speaking Well, "good hard simple words with good hard clear meaning are good things to use when yous speak.”
Presentations don’t need:
complicated language
lots of fancy diagrams, bar graphs or badly copied tables
every fancy theory listed that might fit to the thesis
high speed delivery.
Presentations do need careful proofreading, checking for English errors and an overuse of words. It pays to put yourself into the place of the attendees and look at the presentation from their perspective, so that when they leave, they are thinking of what you said, rather than remembering your bad slides.
