The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
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The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
1–10 of 12 posts
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#2You shouldn't even have text at all on the bottom half of the slide. Text on a slideshow presentation should be minimal. The audience should be listening to you, not reading your slides.
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#3The hierarchy of slides goes something like:
Relevant images which support the speaker
Relevant graphs, rendered for projection
Relevant microcopy which gives context or focus
Relevant videos which are kept as short as possible
Bullet slides which double as effective microcopy
Bullet slides which double as speaker's notes
Most slides which animate in point-by-point
Irrelevant or unnecessarily long videos
Unreadable diagrams
Unreadable walls of text
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#4Surely it's "know where you're presenting".
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#5Michael Alley describes an "Assertion-Evidence" structure for slides, in which the heading becomes something more like a sentence that states the point, and the rest of the slide presents evidence in support of that.
http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html
This approach tends to do away with traditional headings altogether, so it tends to push you in the same direction as, or even a step beyond, the production-oriented advice given here.
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#6That seems like rather venue-specific advice. In the average lecture hall or conference room I've presented in, all the seats can see the full screen just fine.
In fact, I've sometimes put important graphics as low as possible, knowing the lights in a particular room tended to wash out the top half of slides a bit.
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#7This is a handy tip but calling it the zeroth law just because a cranky blogger got stuck at the back of a presentation is extreme.
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#8Now that I'm a crotchety old man, my zeroth rule of presentations is to always use the bathroom before presenting.
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#9Now that I'm a crotchety old man, my zeroth rule of presentations is to always use the bathroom before presenting.
Actually, it's a good idea for anyone. Get everything in order, because you're talking for up to an hour. You don't want to be in the middle of a talk and some part of your brain pokes you about not having used the washroom, and another part of your brain idly speculates about how the audience would respond to an intermission...
Same with eating a reasonable while beforehand. Not too close to the talk, so you're not processing food too much while talking, not too far before... Helps your distributed mind care about your audience. And sleep helps you improvise better and have a sharper sense of humor.
Re: The Zeroth Rule of Presentations
#10This is what I hate about these "I put up funny photos and slap some clever sentence below them"-style presentations. If you're not sitting in the front row, you cannot read anything.