Presentation Strategies

Don’t have time to put together a well-designed and visual slide deck? Create a handout with a brief outline of your talk with space for listeners to take notes. There’s no law that says that every type of talk must have slides to accompany it.

Resist the urge to play with presentation software before you have thoroughly read your sources and developed your outline.

Many presenters put their speaking notes on their slides, which results in an awkward presentation where the presenter turns away from the audience and reads their own slides. Create speaking notes to keep in front of you and avoid looking at your slides.

Tips for speaking notes

Keep them brief and print in a large (18-22 point) font. These should be an outline of your key points, rather than the full text of your speech. Alternately, print your slidedeck in Handout format (vertical, 4 per page is index card size) and tape copies of your slides to index cards, marking your animations for reference.

If you have to present without notes, use your speaking notes to practice until you don’t need them anymore.

A headline helps audiences keep track of your main points, but no one can read and listen at the same time, so there’s no reason to put more than a few words on any one slide. It is often appropriate to avoid text altogether and create purely visual slides.

Sans serif fonts don’t use serifs, the lines, strokes, or projections that attach to the main stroke lines that form letters in typography. Sans serif fonts create improved readability on a screen or slide. Common sans serif fonts include Adobe Clean, Ariel, Calibri, Century Gothic, Helvetica, and Roboto.

Bullet points longer than three-five words and lists with more than three-five items distract audiences from what you’re saying. However, an image is often a better choice than a bulleted list.

Each item in a numbered or bulleted list should begin with the same type of word to help audiences quickly understand your points. See examples below.

Parallel List Beginning with a Verb

Third Quarter Goals

• Increase sales by 20%
• Roll out two new product lines
• Hire one sales professional

Parallel List Beginning with a Noun

Common Investment Products

• Stocks
• Bonds
• Derivatives

Parallel List Beginning with a Modifier

Popular Items from the 2019 Collection

• Cashmere sweaters
• Skinny high-rise jeans
• Floral sneakers
• Chunky scarves

Read every word out loud and ask a trusted friend or colleague to check your slides for embarrassing errors. Pro Tip: many spell check programs don’t highlight mistakes if the text is in all caps.

Audiences have seen the most commonly used PowerPoint or Google Slide templates before, in contexts unrelated to what you have to say. Customize fonts and colors and other design elements to create a unique template.

Note: organizational templates don’t need to be customized, though you will still want to use them thoughtfully. Pay attention to how your text and images relate to objects in the template.

Use WebAIM’s color contrast checker to evaluate the accessibility of your chosen color combinations.

Brainstorm a way to illustrate all of your main ideas and supporting details.

Low quality images distract from your message.

There’s no reason to put three graphs on one slide; create a new slide for each graph, with a headline that clearly states what the graph shows. Additionally, look for images that are appropriately sized. More pixels = better quality—click Tools/Size in Google image search to return only large images. Small images that you enlarge will look blurry on the screen.