Imagine you are sitting in an audience. There’s quite a complicated presentation going on and you are attempting to follow it. The presenter is using a lot of slides with several sentences on every slide.
What do you do? Keep listening to the speaker and ignore the slides completely, or attempt to read the slides whilst the speaker keeps talking? Neither option works. Either you try to ignore the distraction of the slides and listen – hard to do. Or you can chose the opposite – while you struggle to read the slide, the speaker has moved on to a new topic.
Don’t try to use slides as hand-outs for the audience to take away. They are attending a face-to-face communication, not reading a book. Reading and listening are two completely different forms of communications, using different mental processes. Audiences can’t read slides and listen at the same time. In fact, If you have too much on the slides, they are very hard to read on their own, even without the complication of listening.
I’ve talked previously about how brief good slide content must be. Basically – hardly any words. Let’s face it: If the slides were any use to someone who hadn’t attended the presentation, they probably didn’t communicate well during it!
Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen has a good example of using speaker notes plus slides for a reasonable compromise on the slide+hand-out front.
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