What is on That Slide ? - Reproduced by Subscription to Shutterstock
I just returned from the 2024 annual sessions of the American College of Sports Medicine. The conference was great and seeing old friends was one of the highlights. There were many excellent talks, but I am always surprised when great presenters use poor slides. This is again presumptuous on my part (but then this whole blog claiming “Rules of Cardiology” from me is presumptuous), but here are some thoughts on slide preparation from me and from a course on Power Point that I took in the mid 1990’s. The next blog will relate why I still refer to a 1990’s lecture.
1. Decide what your goal is for the lecture. Some folks present to teach. Some folks present to show off. The best approach is to show off by doing a great job teaching. If you want to teach well, your slides have to be good. If you are just showing off, be my guest and load up your slides with un-readable material.
2. Avoid what I call “verbal – visual disconnect”. A verbal-visual disconnection occurs when you are saying something that’s different from what’s on the slide. Most people can’t listen and read effectively at the same time. So, if you put up a slide with a lot of text on it, the audience will start reading the slide, and have trouble listening to you. To avoid this, I suggest you use the “Animations” section of the Power Point toolbar and then the “Appear” option. This will allow you to bring in your slide statements, line by line. That way, what you are saying and what the audience is seeing are in sync. The audience cannot read more than what’s appearing at that time because you only bring in the next topic, when you are ready to discuss it.
3. Use a dark background with strongly contrasting lettering. I generally use dark blue for background, yellow for the titles, and white for the regular statements. But when I want to emphasize a statement, I change the phrase or the word I want to emphasize from yellow to white in the title and from white to yellow in the slide body.
4. I often use thickly lined red boxes or circles for added emphasis, but otherwise avoid red because about 8 percent of men are red-green color blind. Only 0.5 percent of women are so affected.
5. Use the biggest font possible.
6. Use bold for everything in the slide body. It enhances the readability.
7. Separate all words on the slide by two spaces and not just one. It makes it much easier to read from a distance.
8. Start all key words with a capital letter. This also makes it easier to read.
9. Eliminate all unnecessary words. You are not writing the great American novel, but a single slide.
10. Don’t put more than two or three graphs or pictures on a slide. Basic scientists seem to put multiple graphs and pictures on a single slide all the time. They have a slide with the muscle biopsy specimen, the serum proteins, the mRNA gene expression pattern, and the regression graphs for all measurements – all on the same slide. The audience cannot read any of them, but the audience tries to read the slide instead of listening to the presenter. The slide looks like a figure out of a Science publication. If the graphs/figures are important for the lecture, put no more than two or three graphs/figures on a slide so the audience can see them.
11. Expand any graphs/figures to the largest size possible. It is amazing the number of times I saw slides with an un-readable figure that had not been expanded to use the available space.
13. Gratitude is one of the shortest lived human emotions so consider a slide that acknowledges whomever invited you. We are usually required to include a “conflict of interest” slide. After my standard conflict slide, I include another labelled “Additional Conflicts”, and use the animations function to bring in the statement, “I Am A Big XXX Fan”. So, when I gave cardiology grand rounds at Northwestern it said, “I Am A Big Neil Stone Fan” because I am and he invited me. It’s a different way to thank someone. (Not that the words in the sample acknowledgement are double spaced apart and capitalized.)
So, how can I remember a lecture from the 1990’s? Find out on the next installment.
#power point #lecture #slides #teaching #medical education
This is fantastic advice, Paul!
thank you this is great