Audiences are fed up with incessant slide-slapping (more commonly known as “death by PowerPoint”). Yet, an increasing number of presenters can’t seem to stop. It’s some weird addiction – one slide feels so good, 50 must amplify the effect. Yet it’s the audiences who truly suffer.
Knowing you have a slide-slapping problem is the first step to getting the help you need. So how do you know when you are just over-sliding, or have truly descended to the depths of slide-slapping? The best course of action, if you think you may have a problem, is to abstain from using slides at all. However, there are a few questions that indicate it may be time to get help:
- You have more slides than minutes in your presentation.
- You need your slides to know what you are going to say next.
- You spend more time creating your slides than working on your presentation.
- You don’t understand the difference between your slides and you presentation.
- If you could be at the meeting, your audience could just read your slides.
- If your laptop or AV doesn’t work, you can’t present.
If any of these apply to you, it’s not too late. Many others like you have gotten help, and remained free of slide-dependency. They have realized that speaker support is really just that – speaker support. In the process they discovered that it is their knowledge that is of primary importance, and in order to communicate it clearly, they must give more though to the structure of their message, not the media.