I presented at the Advanced Composites in Civil Construction conference up in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago. Whilst there I sat through some terrible presentations. I wish people would think about their presentations a bit more. If nothing else, maybe getting everyone to watch the following clip would help….
Very funny, perhaps even more so because it is so true!
One presenter was reading off his slides. He was even talking to the projected image – the audience could have been absent. His last slide had 75 words on it. And I know this because I read it well before he had finished reading it (you can read text much faster than people can read it aloud….), sat there for a while feeling very bored, then counted the number of words and worked out that he could have deleted all but the last seven and still had the same message on the screen. And if he had done that there would have been a much better chance that I would have been listening to him, which surely was the whole point of him being there?
You can see my slides below.
Notice that they might not make perfect sense without the notes (you can view the notes pages if you look at the presentation on the Slideshare site) – but that is the point!
They are not documents, they are slides for a presentation.
If they were slides to be read on the internet then they would need modification so that the story worked without me being there. But since I was there, they act as a support for the presentation, they do not replace it. Slides in a presentation are there to emphesise the point you are making at that time, not to replace you.
So, please, don’t write all your words on the slide…..
