Learn to create effective presentations

Learn the principles of clear, persuasive slides — and what to leave off them.

Time:: 60 min
Cost:: free
Difficulty:: moderate
Where:: Indoors
Best:: Solo

Nearly everyone tries to create effective presentations by adding: more slides, more detail, more supporting evidence. The reliable improvement comes from the opposite direction. Decide the single thing you want an audience to remember next week, then delete everything that does not serve it. An hour of cutting beats an hour of building.

Why learn to create effective presentations is worth an hour

An audience retains very little from any talk, and what they retain is not proportional to what you presented. Dense slides actively compete with you for attention, because people read faster than you speak and then stop listening. Reducing each slide to one idea removes that competition and forces you to know your material rather than read it.

How to learn to create effective presentations step by step

1
Write the one-sentence takeaway
What should they repeat to a colleague next week? Write it down before opening any presentation software.
2
Outline on paper first
Slides encourage you to design before you think. Paper keeps you on structure until the argument holds together.
3
One idea per slide
If a slide needs two headings it is two slides. More slides with less on each is almost always better.
4
Replace bullet lists with a visual
A chart, a photo, a single number. Bullets are notes to yourself masquerading as content for others.
5
Move the detail to an appendix
Keep the supporting data after the final slide. It exists for questions rather than for the narrative.

Tips to get more out of it

Never read your slides aloud. If the slide says it, you are redundant; if you say it, the slide is.
Design for the back row. Text that is comfortable on your laptop is illegible from six meters away.
Rehearse the transitions between slides. That is where most talks lose their thread, not within the slides.

Ways to mix it up

If the deck will be read rather than presented, write it as a document instead; slides sent by email are a poor format for both purposes. If you present the same material regularly, build one strong version and rehearse it rather than rebuilding each time.