Communicationz

Pause in your PowerPoint presentation

The human brain doesn't cope well with working on two closely related activities at once.  To experience this, try singing two easy songs at once.  You will find that you have to switch back and forth between the two. 

This challenge is quite similar to what we expect people to do duriing a PowerPoint presentation.  As Rich Allen said at the recent NZATD conference: If you bring up a new slide, you must pause while people read it.  If you continue to talk, the audience can either listen to you or read, but they can't do both very well. After he made that comment, I noticed the frustration of this conflict in all the subsequent conference workshops and keynote speeches.  Every speaker broke that rule of thumb and it definitely made it hard to absorb information.

The brain's need for a pause is another reason for keeping your slides simple. The more you have on the slide, the longer it will take to read it.  Keeping slide information to the minimum enables your audience to focus on you and your message.

You can turn the necessity of that slide pause into a real plus.  To get the real benefit, as you pause, look around the audience and tune into where they are at.  You could also focus on the impact you want to create with your next point.

For some other good advice on pause, look at Bert Decker's blog:www.bertdecker.com

Those slide titles make a difference

We have always encouraged presenters to use the title of each slide to summarise the point of the slide.  Now there is some proof that this approach makes a big difference to audience comprehension. 

Ellen Finklestein's useful PowerPoint newsletter shows that student recall is considerably higher when the slides make an assertion in the title and then give the evidence to support the assertion. You might want to check out the research she quotes - it is from the Pennsylvania State College of Education.  The university calls the approach: Assertion - Evidence.   Finklestein describes it more simply as the 'Tell - Show' technique:

1. Create a title that states the point of the slide.  This helps the audience understand the point.
2. Use an image to make the concept clear.

We would add:

   3.  When you are presenting, use the assertion of the title to really focus in on the point you want to make.

If you want more detailed background on this, check out: research from the Pennsylvania State College of Engineering.