These days when I am attending a workshop or a seminar, I often feel I am still in Kindergarten: I am being read to.
Not just that. I am being read to and I am a grown adult!!
Why do speakers insist on reading bullet points to their audiences? Do they think that audiences cannot read? They sure can. And once you put up that slide and start reading, guess where their attention goes?
If you didn’t answer “elsewhere,” you better think again.
In a workshop last week, I was discussing use of the notes section in PowerPoint. Once you have your outline of your talk, type in what you’d want to say in the notes section. We were doing an exercise with sticky notes and walking through the steps to move from sticky notes to create slides. Rather than type on the slide, start in the notes. This way, all those bullet points you would have put on the slide go in the notes and your slide is saved from the bullet points. So is your audience.
One participant of the workshop commented that by forcing oneself to START in the notes section, it left the opportunity to think about how to visualize the point up on the slide.
Try it! Did it work for you?
That’s right. Outside the box. What box, you say? Open up PowerPoint and what do you see? That’s right, you see this:
A box, two boxes actually, telling you to add a title and text to each slide. You start typing away, right?
STOP! Don’t do it.
Remember the billboard: There are no titles nor bulletpoints. How can you get your point across outside those boxes? Images? Graphics? Something?
Anything but bulletpoints.
In a previous post I suggested typing your thoughts into the notes section. After you’re done that for the entire talk, print out the notes view. Grab a sharpie, a pencil and a pen and visualize how you would illustrate each slide.
A graph?
..What type? Pie? Bar?
A picture?
..Of what?
The web is full of things to help you visualize. Search! Search Flickr, search Google Images (careful on copyright), search stock photo companies, etc. If you can’t find exactly what you want, can you make something? Did something you saw inspire you? Can you create the perfect image from inspiration off of another image you encountered?
How would your audience react to that visual? Does it get your point across?
