Okay, lecturers and presenters of the world, pay attention.
No more of these sleep-inducing and text-filled bores.
1. We don’t like your dull PowerPoints
2. We don’t like the text-dumps on said PowerPoints
3. In fact, we don’t even read your text-dump slides, you’re just wasting your time. Instead, apply the Seth Godin Law: no more than 6 words on a slide. Ever.
4. Pictures are awesome on PowerPoints. Use them a lot.
5. It takes 1.5 seconds to disengage yourself from the lecturer/presenter and take notes, and another 1.5 seconds to get back on track with the talk. That’s a 3 second round trip. Just think about how many times a listener does this…
6. Which leads us to this: stop asking us to take notes. Instead, do the presentation without requesting note-taking and then give us a detailed info sheet afterwards
7. Yes, we know you’re tired, it’s your 47th presentation of the day. Guess what? We don’t care.
8. Be passionate when presentating. If you’re not energetic about your material, then why should we? For lecturers: you’re directly influencing the lives of thousands of students. Sound alive, please.
9. Be brief. Humans have short attention spans so get your point across quickly. It makes it easier for the audience to follow and helps you identify the most important points of your presentation.
10. Leave plenty of time for Q&A. For the lecturers: you should know that discussion about the material is one of the best ways to learn, so make that a priority during you lectures. For presenters: whether you’re selling an idea or a product, people often don’t buy it just by logic. We don’t decide to go on holidays because it makes logical sense, but because our emotions tell us we want one. But if we later need a reason, our emotions are it. Q&A will contribute to making an emotional connection with your audience.
8….we are all so dead!
waahahhaha