Interesting Stuff

Hey – if you’re going to use Powerpoint (or Beamer or Prosper, or any other slideshow-making program), please, please follow these rules:

Don’t read your slides to me. If I can get this information from the slide, I will. If you read your slides to me, I’m going to start ignoring one or the other, and I like visual things, so I’ll start ignoring you. Use the slides to supplement what you’re saying.

On a related note, don’t put too much text on your slides. A rule of thumb that Dodds seems to use is that for every complete sentence, you need at least one picture. If your slide contains 3 full-length paragraphs, it feels cluttered, and becomes hard to focus on. Ideally, the slide will have a list of 2-5 sentence fragments reminding the presenter about what they are supposed to talk about.

Spend 1-3 minutes on each slide. If you skip through a slide in 5 seconds, it probably wasn’t necessary. If you spend 5 minutes on a slide, it’s probably too complicated.

Only use Powerpoint when it will enhance your presentation. If a slideshow will not help your talk, don’t make one! Saying “it’s the standard; everybody makes one” is no excuse. When I saw security guru Bruce Shneier give a talk, he started out by saying something to the effect of, “I used to have a Powerpoint to go with this talk, but it wasn’t very useful, so I took it out.” For this comment alone, he got a huge ovation.

It seems like everyone is confident that they can use powerpoint well, when actually around 95% of people cannot. Last night, I had this very discussion with my PerCog partner while making our presentation. She had her heart set on a Powerpoint presentation, with her main reason being that everyone else uses them. I stressed several times that we shouldn’t just read the slides to people, and at the end she said she’d make an introduction slide after I left. You know what’s on it? I shall paste the text below:

“[…] Bouhuys, Bloem and Groothuis asked whether music affects our actual perceptions of the facial expression of emotions of other people (5). […] Music had a powerful effect. For example, after listening to depressing music, subjects judged neutral faces to more express rejection/sadness and less invitation/happiness, despite the fact that such emotions were actually not present in those faces.”

I’m almost positive that during our presentation, she will read this verbatim to the class. We also have 3 slides on which we will probably spend less than 5 seconds each. Argh!