Presentations and Powerpoint

Students in the Modern I dance class are preparing class presentations on important figures in early modern dance. As part of their presentation, they are required to prepare a Powerpoint presentation. We've all seen good Powerpoint presentations, and we've all seen bad ones, and the experience of sitting through a bad one should be enough motivation to prepare a good one-- unless inflicting that sort of punishment is part of your goal.

There is one overarching guideline that appears almost anywhere someone offers advice about using Powerpoint, and you've probably all seen it before:

DON'T READ YOUR SLIDES.

If you're reading your slides during the presentation, your attention is away from where it needs to be: your audience. Not only will your audience notice right away that you're not looking at them, but you'll also look like someone who can't give the presentation without consulting giant wall-sized projected cue cards, i.e., like someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.

The problem with this one guideline is that it doesn't give you ideas for what you should do; it only gives you one more thing to not do. What are some affirmative corollaries that will actually give you ways to help prepare for the presentation?

1) There's no substitute for knowing what you're talking about.

You don't have to be the world's foremost expert on whatever-it-is. You do have to be able to get your big ideas across and make your salient points without looking over your shoulder.
You also don't have to memorize everything, but if you need notecards, keep them small and simple, and hold on to them. Your slides are not for you, they're for your audience.

2) Create a final summary slide: a bullet list of your main concepts.

Boiling your presentation down to a list of bullet points will make you clarify your ideas, and clarity is as important here as content. A great way to practice your presentation is to make your final summary slide, and rehearse your presentation using only that slide. Do that a couple of times, and pretty soon the main idea will trigger all of the little sub-ideas buried in it, and you can talk to your audience instead of over your shoulder.

3) Watch your slide presentation without talking.

If all of your content is contained in your slides, then either each slide has too many words or you have too many slides. By themselves, your slides should be woefully inadequate for the presentation, which is good-- you're going to fill in the gaps by speaking. This leads to...

3a) If a lot of people ask you for your slides, that means they contain too much information.

A lot of this comes from an excellent blog post over at Rands In Repose, which is one of my favorite blogs. The author is a software engineer, so while he's not involved in the arts per se, he gives (and sees) enough Powerpoints to have very clear ideas about what makes them effective or not. My favorite suggestion of his is to Invoke A Disaster. It's worth checking out.

--Bill Sallak (Asst. Prof./Dance Music Director/Moderator)