The Argument Clinic

So I had a pretty long day of listening to presentations today.  Heard some of them before and a few others didn’t really pertain to anything I work on.  But that wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t for the fact that just about every one of my presentation-related pet peeves were fit into one day. 

Let me start out by saying, I am not a wonderful public speaker and I hate doing it.  But there are certain presentation issues that can easily be avoided that can improve the overall presentation, even if you aren’t a fan of talking and sounding really excited about something.  Not saying I am perfect at putting together presentations by any means…but these are some tips that I thought could be useful (pulled together from corporate training classes and many many hours spent as a frustrated audience member).  These are:

1) Don’t put slides up when text that is vital to understanding the info is too small to be read without a magnifying glass.  Please.  If you can’t read the words you need to in order to understand what is going on in the slide, then that slide does not serve a purpose and should be deleted.  The information can always be presented in a different form to convey important points without giving people headaches by forcing them to squint their eyes in hopes of getting something valuable from the slide.

2) If there are graphs on your slides, make the axes labels and legends large enough to be read and descriptive enough to be understood.

3) Define acronyms.

4) Avoid trying to make every point regarding an issue in one overly crowded, hard to follow slide.  Separating the issues into multiple slides helps with clarity and makes it so your slides can actually be understood by the audience.  There is not a prize for cramming the most info possible onto one slide.

5) Don’t use dark text on a dark background or light text on a light background.  Ever.

6)  Don’t use photos as a background for a slide if you intend to put text in front of it.  Seriously, the slides are for the benefit of the audience and if they can not read it, there is no purpose in showing it.

7) Please use animation in slides very sparingly.  This is just distracting and often doesn’t serve the intended purpose anyway.

8) If you are given an allotted time for a presentation, please be considerate of the people planning the meeting and those attending and actually time your presentation before the meeting.  This may force you to cut some slides, but the point of a presentation isn’t to overload an audience with everything you ever thought about a topic. 

9) Check your spelling.  Multiple spelling errors takes away from the rest of your presentation and calls what you say into question.  That may seem petty, but it’s true. 

10)  This brings points 1-9 together.  Chances are, if you are giving a presentation at a meeting, you have also attended presentations before in your life.  Try to look at your slides from the perspective of someone viewing it and revise accordingly.  Could help to have someone review your slides and provide their feedback to you before the meeting.

Not saying its possible to be perfect with respect to making presentations and some information can be difficult to follow regardless of the way it is presented, but good things to keep in mind.

Let me start by saying, I love new york (i.e. upstate/not just nyc).  It’s where I have always lived and it’s the place where I feel at home.  And regardless of how nice a place is that I am visiting or how interesting it may be, whenever I leave ny a huge part of me always misses it.  That’s part of why I get excited when I find really good bagels at airports.

So now that we have cleared this up, what does that have to do with bathroom tiles, rachel?  Good question.  See in my last post I mentioned that this hotel reminds me a lot of buildings in troy, ny…bathroom in my hotel room included.  Its a little small and has old bathroom tile that you would see in many troy apartments (small, occasionally cracked, white hexagons with black outlines - is that called grout?  drawing a blank…).  Though it is cleaner and fresher looking than many troy apartments, when I walk in there I feel like I am transported back to ny and I feel more comfortable and at home than I normally do in hotel rooms.  Sounds like a simple thing, but sometimes in my travels God just gives me little reminders that He is there with me when I am away from NY as well…and this time it was bathroom tiles that did the trick.  Guess I am low maintenance in this area