
Slide Rules
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"Slide Rulesis useful to anyone creating slides (including Prezi) and to instructors who want to teach their students best practices. While the evidence-assertion method works best for presenting scientific information, this book covers a broad enough territory that even marketing and sales presenters could learn important skills." (Technical Communication, 1 February 2015)More details
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Content
A Note from the Series Editor xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Foreword xv
Introduction 1
Understand our path to these techniques 1
Witness the change 2
Feel confident about these techniques 3
References 3
1 Heed the Pleas for Better Presentations 5
Know the enemy 6
Be an agent of change 8
Call a meeting instead of summoning a slide deck 8
Destroy the decks of drudgery 8
Learn communication lessons from past tragedies 9
Confront conventional poor practices 10
Consider slides as a two-part deliverable 11
Implement your own continuous improvement 12
References 12
Slide Rule #1 Revisit Presentation Assumptions
2 Apply Cognitive Science and Tell a Story 17
Change presentation practices using grounded research 17
Stay open to change 18
Revisit how a slide works 19
Design slides for audience's cognitive load 20
Lessen cognitive load with storytelling 24
Apply science and storytelling 27
References 27
3 Understand Audience Needs 29
Scope content toward identified purpose 29
Learn about your audience first 30
Determine the presentation's purpose 32
Examine the goals for a talk 33
Elevate the moment 33
Assess the audience 34
Prepare for a familiar audience 34
Prepare for an unfamiliar audience 35
Coping when your talk gets hijacked 37
Ditch the "dumb it down" attitude 38
Think of audience needs, not yours 42
Think about logistics 45
References 48
4 Challenge Your Organization's Culture of Text-Heavy Slides 49
Understand the patterns' origin 50
Stop assuming they want to read 50
Work toward fewer bullets, less text 51
Avoid using slides as teleprompters 53
Build information deliberately 54
Move beyond "How many slides should I use?" 54
Encourage better presentation practices 56
Create, compile, organize, and stabilize team presentations 58
Work towards a change 60
References 60
Slide Rule #2 Write Sentence Headers
5 Clarify Topics with Full-Sentence Headers 65
Write full sentences for headers, avoiding fragments 65
Consider the case against fragmented headers 66
Deploy best practices for sentence headers 70
Expect immediate results 71
Write targeted headers 73
State a fact or explain a concept 74
Showcase an analysis 80
Transition to new information 84
Influence outcomes with headers 88
Frequently asked questions about sentence headers 88
References 91
Slide Rule #3 Use Targeted Visuals
6 Build Information Incrementally 95
Build something better than bullets 95
Devise methods that build information 97
Design with words to make bullet lovers happy 98
Solidify complex topics with refrains 99
Use refrain slides for meeting agendas 100
Create visuals for directed comprehension 103
Build out to drill down 107
7 Generate Quality Graphs 109
Portray complexity simply 110
Determine the right visual 111
Design reasonable pie charts 112
Design impactful bar charts and histograms 117
Design scatter XY charts and scatter plots 121
Craft line charts 127
Map out area graphs 128
Think through flow or process charts 130
Address assorted other visual outputs 132
Graph ethically 133
Create accessible graphics 136
Frequently asked questions about graphs 138
References 139
Further reading 140
8 Picture the Possibilities 141
Center yourself 143
Manage image interpretation 143
Model accurately 143
Be ethical with visuals 149
Frequently asked questions about using pictures 150
References 151
9 Temper the Templates 153
See the possibilities in a template, branded or otherwise 153
Discover and assess a branded template 154
Work with company templates 156
Devise solutions for problematic templates 156
Fix the template 162
Provide template guidance 164
Refine quad slides 165
Establish brand when there is no template 166
Slide Rule #4 Archive Details for Future Use
10 Make Slide Decks with Archival and Legacy Value 175
Understand that slides have two lives 175
Start new best practices 177
Document ideas efficiently 178
Use the Notes or Presenter Notes feature 179
Get others to see your notes 180
Use hidden slides 181
Keep hidden slides ready 183
Make retrieval easy for everyone else 184
Embrace full documentation as part of workflow 187
References 188
11 Include More Than One Language 189
Know when English is not enough 189
Start with audience analysis 192
Anticipate formatting for translations 192
Deploy plain language 192
Write in one language and talk in another 195
Design split slides 195
Capture translation in notes 197
Translate toward clarity 197
Find resources 198
References 198
Slide Rule #5 Keep Looking Forward
12 Enact Organizational Change 203
Listen to the studies 203
Anticipate the stages of acceptance 204
Tally the results 207
Look for the opportunities 208
References 208
13 Thinking Through the Next Big Thing 209
See ahead 209
Play with Prezi 210
Use caution 211
Amaze with Autodesk 211
Apply apps 213
Remain diligent in your best practices 214
Index 215
About the Authors 219
1
Heed the Pleas for Better Presentations
The work that engineers, scientists, and technical experts perform changes the world. Part of that process is technical communication, and it comes in all forms, including presentations. Some talks are formal, some are casual. To aid their complex work, subject matter experts use slides as scaffolding to support their words and concepts. However, too often, when speakers use slides, it becomes a dismal affair. With an excess of bullets, poor audience analysis, and the tendency to use slides as teleprompters, speakers have adopted numerous bad habits over the last 20 years. Unfortunately, the technical fields have not escaped the pervasive tendency to abuse audiences with slides. In this chapter, we will introduce proven alternatives.
Know the enemy
We hear it from industry, government, pockets of academia, and even the very creators of slide templates themselves: slides can cause major problems for presenters and audiences alike. It is too bad, really, because there is so much potential when slideware is used with purpose and toward targeted outcomes. If optimized outcomes are desired, then speakers need to maximize the effectiveness of presentation software tools.
Slide abuse appears in myriad forms; there are slides as teleprompters, slides as scripts, slides as data dumps, and slides as bullet boxes. The purpose for slides as audience aids is practically forgotten. Instead, the use of slides has become more of an unexamined ritual rather than a fully conceived information vehicle. See Figure 1.1 for a sample of a typical, less-than-optimal slide design. On the other hand, see how the same slide, reconfigured in Figure 1.2, shows a more engaging way to communicate the same material.
The depths of the problems with poor slide design are widely reported. Of late, it is difficult to browse a blog, attend a conference, or read a professional publication without seeing some discussion of how to improve presentation skills and slide design mastery. The creators of Microsoft’s PowerPoint program have commented on the rampant misuse of their creation by otherwise well-intentioned professionals [1]; top military commanders have called PowerPoint “the enemy” [2]; government agencies and boards bemoan PowerPoint engineering [3]; at least one information design guru has compared bad slides’ dominance of the presentation field to Stalin’s totalitarian regime [4]. At universities, students lament the laundry lists of bulleted ideas that their professors present in lecture, too often skipping steps and eschewing logical progressions of thought [5]. A decade-long mission called the “Annoying PowerPoint Survey” consistently documents the pain felt by audiences [6]. Blogs and other media continue the conversations daily as slide abuse persists.
FIGURE 1.1: Traditional slides fail.Slides that present nothing more than a series of bullets, such as this one, often fail because they do not engage the audience. Thisdesign approach does not incorporate what experts know about the ways that humans learn.
FIGURE 1.2: New practices work better. Deploy complete thoughts, high-value visuals, and archival notes. Doing so will move you toward creating technical talks that can be enhanced by slides rather than hobbled by them.
All too often, presenters and their audiences disparage the slide software itself as the problem. There is truth to that sentiment; no presentation tool is without its flaws. But poor presentations do not begin with imperfect presentation software. It is the unexamined patterns of communication that creates the problem. Slides have wonderful potential to reach people using all learning styles [7], but presenters too often kill that potential with a static, text-heavy approach.
Within the engineering, scientific, and technical fields, it is lamentable that many see communication as subordinate to engineering or scientific work, that communicating the details or results of the work is of lesser importance than the technical work itself. The engineers we work with spend 20–80% of their time at work engrossed in communication efforts, and those communication skills must be honed. Think of it this way: most of the work of building a bridge is the communication about the bridge. Much less time is actually spent building the structure. Communication about engineering and science is the bulk of the work in these fields. The sheer magnitude and importance of technical communication means that we must always strive for best practices.
While facts are immutable, the way we communicate them is never quite objective. Technical work, as much as anyone desires it to be “objective,” is subject to human perceptions. Once we acknowledge that communication is key and that it is always framed by subjective lenses, we understand that engineering and technical communication presentations need to be as clear, elegant, concise, and accurate as the work they give voice to. Applying best practices to presentations should be as much a part of the work output as anything else.
Be an agent of change
Our approach to shifting practices for engineering, scientific, or technical presentations is simple, and it looks like this:
Revisit presentation assumptions.
Write sentence headers.
Use targeted visuals.
Archive details for future use.
Keep looking forward.
Call a meeting instead of summoning a slide deck
Because presentations have become cornerstones for information dispersal in engineering, technical, and scientific realms (including business, research, government, and academia), presenters must find the best way possible to push that information to key players. When the audience becomes dissatisfied or bored with how information is conveyed, a barrier to success forms. We need to help listeners receive crucial technical information in more efficient, relevant, and applicable ways.
Current organizational cultures equate presentations and meetings with the creation of a set of slides. When a meeting is called, participants expect both a speaker and a slide deck. Probably all of us have heard, “I can’t make the meeting. Just send me your slides.” Whether the omnipresent use of slides as a work-related communication is good or bad, we will not argue here. In truth, slides have become an organizational norm. And if the speaker decides to conform to that expectation, the information dispersal must be as accurate, detailed, efficient, and helpful as possible.
At the same time, at the core of many technical fields is an ardent desire to make everything quicker, better, and cheaper. This demand applies to the gizmos, machines, processes, research, and materials that technical professionals produce; it also applies to the communication efforts used to push deliverables out the door. It is time to find a better way to turn information into action.
Destroy the decks of drudgery
Many of us in the technical fields have borne witness to thousands of slides that contain one word at the top and a parade of bullets below. These “decks of drudgery,” as one engineering colleague named them, are the bane of the working world (Figure 1.3). Of course, such slides seem perfectly reasonable and useful to the speaker, because the speaker either wants a teleprompter or does not understand the damage being done to the technical content [8].
However, this approach simply fails for the audience. The speaker may have thought that the slides’ information was perfectly organized; however, to the audience, the patterns were not so obvious. The speaker fills the screen with fragmented pieces of complex technical information, which are nothing more than fancy sticky notes projected on a large screen. This fails as an information vehicle, and it fails as a communication strategy. The audience deserves better.
A person would find it hard to unearth an organization or a company that is not looking to identify “best practices” to enhance workflow, streamline production, increase productivity, and/or develop good knowledge-exchange systems. To make technical presentations better, the best problem-solving techniques need to be applied to current presentation practices in order to find better ways to reach colleagues, coworkers, management, clients, and the public.
FIGURE 1.3: A deck of drudgery alienates the audience. The familiar bullet-laden slide deck is burdensome to the audience and a crutch for the speaker. Slide decks that look like this are nothing but a box of mind-numbing bullets. Better practices move a technical communicator toward presentation skills that engage and inform.
Learn communication lessons from past tragedies
It is not too often that poor technical information practices lead to death. But sometimes they do. At those moments, once the shock and grief for human loss subsides, organizations need to pause and examine internal practices from every angle. The Columbia Space Shuttle explosion had this impact in multiple disciplines, including presentation strategies; more than one person has linked poor slide design to the...
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