For more learner-friendly presentations, consider dropping 90% of the written words from your overheads. To borrow a line from Seth Godin, “Why would you use words on the screen when they do just fine in your mouth??? This isn’t a cheep gimmick or a way around figuring out what you’ll say. You can narrate a picture slide with a title or no text at all. If there are statistics and details you need to deliver, create a handout.
Think of everything you display on the screen as a roadside billboard, a message that must transfer instantly at 65 miles per hour. Engaging photographs can connect emotionally with your audience and convey your meaning through metaphors (picture this: “Building a career is like building a house.??) Cognitive research shows that people learn twice as well when words are narrated rather than when extraneous words are presented onscreen.
High-quality pictures are now easily available online through stock houses and free services like Stock.xchng and MorgueFile.
I worked at Microsoft when PowerPoint became the “it?? application with the consulting set because it could convey complex ideas on easy-to-understand screens. I’ve seen thousands of presentations and the only ones I remember, let alone learned from, used visual metaphors instead of words.
I also have a confession: I came late to the visual-learning party because I sometimes find pictures more attention-getting than meaningful, providing unnecessary visual noise and distracting me from what I try to read. Think of Websites with flashing banners, presentations with wild swooping fly-ins, or images with so many labels they take a week to digest. I encourage you to avoid all of those, instead using graphics to direct attention and guide people through what might seem overly complex if explained in text.
And one more caution: Diagrams that oversimplify a process can be just as harmful to the learning process as going without. Like optical illusions, images can play on expectations, and trick people into believing they completely understand nuance and implications because they grasp the nut in view.
While we all will benefit from seeing with our brains, let’s use that gray matter for good.
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