I simply put together a slide with my name, the title of the talk and the basic contact information I want to provide. What do you put on the screen if presenting at a slide-dominant event? Given a choice between a great talk with lousy slides, and a lousy talk with great slides, what do you think most audiences would choose? Prepare accordingly. Even if you are a visual thinker and need something to look at to develop your ideas, develop your ideas and rehearse assuming the slide deck is scaffolding you will remove. Don’t fall into the trap of polishing your slides and tweaking fonts when you should be revising your thoughts and practicing how you’re going to express them. If you want your ideas to take center stage, the slides should come late in the process so that they are used only to support what you’re saying, rather than the other way around. And if you decide as you revise that you need slides to best make your points, then add them, but only after you’ve proven their necessity by trying to present without them. If you want to go entirely without slides, you’re already prepared for that. This approach works with or without slides, but in all cases it forces you to develop your ideas into a solid outline and practice delivering it before you’d even consider making a slide.
It forces you to clarify and improve your ideas, making you a better speakerīut slides do have some advantages, including:.You can never become a slave to your slides.You have no fear of slide or A/V malfunctions.Audiences grant you more attention and authority over the room.Speaking without slides is often better because: It demands more thinking and refinement of your ideas.It may require a different way to prepare.
You feel naked without the familiar crutch of slides behind you.Speaking without slides seems more challenging because:
You’d have to listen carefully to figure out when ideas would be better presented visually rather than with words alone, which is the secret for thinking about your own presentations: when do you truly need a visual image to express an idea? And when would it be better simply letting your voices tell the story? Yet the question is easy to ask: would these speeches have been better if they were narrated over slides?
#Preparing slides for faceshift software#
Of course slides and presentation software hadn’t been invented then so it’s unfair to make a direct comparison (For fun see The Gettysburg Address as a bad Powerpoint deck). Look at any list of the best speeches of all time and you won’t find a single use of slides or other props. If you listen to This American Life or The Moth, it’s clear how powerful a speaker can be with their voice alone. Your voice, what you say and how you say it, is the most important thing. And ask anyone who works in media: if the power went out and they could only show your slides or broadcast your voice, they’d go with your voice. Which raises the question: why use presentation slides at all? Most important conversations you will have in your lifetime happen without slides.
#Preparing slides for faceshift full#
Rather that look into your eyes or give full attention to your words, your friend would have their minds divided between you and the images you were showing simultaneously. If you were having an important conversation with a friend at a restaurant, would you pull out a projector and put your slides on the wall? They’d think you were crazy as would the people at other tables.