Most of these tips are good. But the best one is this: never put anything on your slide except a table, picture (I include equations in this set), or graph.
The corollary is to never puts words. No bullets, no drawn-out passages, no quotes. No text should ever, ever be inflicted upon your audience.
It used to be, in the pre-computer days, that people would write their notes on 3x5 cards and then deliver their speech (showing whatever pictures they needed via overhead). But nowadays, thanks the ease of computing, people actually display their 3x5 cards. They spend wasted hours sweating over the exact verbiage of these cards, then give these notes the exalted name "slides".
This is a bad idea because it forces people's attention to some meaningless slide when they should be looking at and listening to you. It takes the presenters attention away from the audience and on to the slide, when the presenter should be looking at the people to see how bored they are. And it forces them to read the damn slide along with you to make sure you haven't left out any words. It's a silly practice that should come to an end.
I attend hundreds of these souped-up talks every year in the course of my job (university professor). And I can't think of a worse way to waste time.
No words: just pictures
Most of these tips are good. But the best one is this: never put anything on your slide except a table, picture (I include equations in this set), or graph.
The corollary is to never puts words. No bullets, no drawn-out passages, no quotes. No text should ever, ever be inflicted upon your audience.
It used to be, in the pre-computer days, that people would write their notes on 3x5 cards and then deliver their speech (showing whatever pictures they needed via overhead). But nowadays, thanks the ease of computing, people actually display their 3x5 cards. They spend wasted hours sweating over the exact verbiage of these cards, then give these notes the exalted name "slides".
This is a bad idea because it forces people's attention to some meaningless slide when they should be looking at and listening to you. It takes the presenters attention away from the audience and on to the slide, when the presenter should be looking at the people to see how bored they are. And it forces them to read the damn slide along with you to make sure you haven't left out any words. It's a silly practice that should come to an end.
I attend hundreds of these souped-up talks every year in the course of my job (university professor). And I can't think of a worse way to waste time.