Back at McKinsey in the 1990s we would write a long-hand sentence, or a “lead” at the top of every slide (similar in length to today’s 140-character Tweets. This sentence would give you the message of the chart and you could get the whole story by reading all the leads in a document, without looking at the exhibits below.
I am re-discovering the sentence recently.
- In some presentation designs, I switch to a slide template with a 2 line title, creating space for longer sentences at the top of a slide.
- Certain thoughts or concepts are just too complex to shorten to 2 bullets of 3 words each, so I am just writing them out.
8 comments
Agreed - sometimes the important, and unabridged, words need to go up onscreen. I have no problem with this. My frustration centres on how badly the majority of people present this kind of slide.
Most of the time, simply reading it out is just stupid - the audience has read ahead and your message gets lost by overcrowding their brains with conflicting visual and aural input. But a lot of presenters find it difficult to stay silent while their audience reads their way through a bunch of words onscreen.
One approach I have been using is to point out that the verbiage onscreen merits reading, allow the audience to read silently, and then click to a new slide with the same text on it, this time with a key phrase, fact or number highlighted in a different colour and focus your audience's attention back that way.
How do you handle this?
Especially in template slides that are presented by many people or sent by email, I find it crucial to make sure that the message is presented and can be easily read from the title or other element in the slide.
I use "free-style" slides when I know who is the presenter (me for example) and anyway write the message in the speaker notes - just in case...
Mac at Clientonomy.com
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I still think about that when building new presentations today.....