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• Presentation = Speech + Slides

  by Derik Badman

  December 17, 2008
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  Back in Octo­ber, Aaron Schmidt posted “HOWTO give a good pre­sen­ta­tion” to his blog walk­ing paper. His sec­ond bul­let point of “thoughts” on good pre­sen­ta­tions is:

  Please don’t fill your slides with words. Find some rel­e­vant and pretty pic­tures to sup­port what you’re say­ing. You can use the pic­tures to remind your­self what you’re going to say next… Your pre­sen­ta­tion should be *very* incom­plete with­out your narration.

  This is some­thing I have been work­ing on since I started giv­ing pre­sen­ta­tions pro­fes­sion­ally. I sat through a lot of bad pre­sen­ta­tions in the past few years, and, while some of them were bad just because the con­tent was poor or unin­ter­est­ing, many of them were just poorly for­mat­ted. In the com­ments on Aaron’s post, Kevin Driedger added:

  …my thoughts on slides — they should illus­trate the talk, like a nice illus­trated book… (Com­ment #10)

  This lead me to a sub­ject my thoughts often set­tle on: comics. In this case the equation:

  Pre­sen­ta­tion = slides + speech [1]

  Comics = image + text

  Ear­lier this year I started using hand drawn images in my slides (see this pdf for an exam­ple), instead of bul­leted lists or pho­tographs, but I hadn’t yet given much thought to the fac­tor that is com­mon to both pre­sen­ta­tions and comics: image-text inter­ac­tion. A num­ber of def­i­n­i­tions of comics empha­size this fac­tor, going all the way back to Rodolphe Topf­fer, the father of the comics form, who, in 1837 describ­ing one of his his­toires en estam­pes, wrote:

  This book is of a mixed nature. It is com­posed of a series of line draw­ings. Each of these draw­ings is accom­pa­nied by one or two lines of text. The draw­ings, with­out this text, would only have an obscure sig­nif­i­cance; the text, with­out the draw­ings, would sig­nify noth­ing. [2]

  This inter­de­pen­dence between image and text is at the core of the form of comics, and the same con­cept can be eas­ily applied to pre­sen­ta­tions. Not all pre­sen­ta­tions nec­es­sar­ily require slides (or words for that mat­ter), as a lec­ture with­out slides or a silent slideshow also form a pre­sen­ta­tion. In that interim place between all slides and all speech, I pre­lim­i­nar­ily posit some types of slide-speech inter­ac­tion [3]:

  1. Slides and speech are redundant:

  This is the clas­sic bor­ing pre­sen­ta­tion. A slide shows a list of bul­leted items while the speaker reads them off or even worse reads whole sen­tences and para­graphs off the slides. This redun­dancy of two infor­ma­tion chan­nels is dis­en­gag­ing. Most atten­dees will read the list for them­selves more quickly than the speaker can say them. The redun­dancy of text and image does not pro­vide any space for fric­tion, thought, or curios­ity. In many cases, where the speaker is not sig­nif­i­cantly elab­o­rat­ing on the slides’ text, the speaker becomes periph­eral and even unnecessary.

  Old comics are great for this sort of tedious redundancy:

  

  from Sheena, Queen of the Jun­gle 11 (Spring 1951): 9.

  2. Slides and speech are independent:

  This is veer­ing into per­for­mance, but I can imag­ine a pre­sen­ta­tion where the speech and the slides tell sep­a­rate nar­ra­tives. This is not to say that the two nar­ra­tives are com­pletely unre­lated; often the point is to draw on the con­flict or sim­i­lar­i­ties between the two. A library con­fer­ence is prob­a­bly not the place to be exper­i­ment­ing with such things though, unless you have some­thing really well done and inter­est­ing planned. Even comics exam­ples of this tac­tic are extremely rare, the most pop­u­lar exam­ple being a short story by Chris Ware called “I Guess” [4].

  

  Pan­els from Chris Ware’s “I Guess”

  3. Speech car­ries presentation:

  At some point peo­ple stopped just talk­ing and started using slides and other media. I can’t think of many exam­ples of straight-up speeches that I’ve seen at con­fer­ences, other than some keynotes (by non-librarians) at ACRL. More com­mon is a cur­sory use of slides that tend to be brief, visu­ally dull, and do lit­tle to add any­thing to the speech. I used to make a lot of slides that would fall into this cat­e­gory, for instance:

  

  One of my bor­ing slides from 2006.

  These slides were accom­pa­nied by lots of talk­ing. The slides act as lit­tle more than place­hold­ers, a visual sig­ni­fier to back-up the speech and add a small por­tion of empha­sis. This type of pre­sen­ta­tion is not nec­es­sar­ily bad, but it does require a speaker who is dynamic and engag­ing. Depend­ing on the presentation’s con­tent, this for­mat may leave some­thing to be desired in its abil­ity to con­vey infor­ma­tion in a com­plete man­ner. If I am speak­ing about a web appli­ca­tion, hav­ing a num­ber of screen­shots in the slides can aid greatly in com­pre­hen­sion for the audience.

  This type of speech and slide com­bi­na­tion is rather pop­u­lar, get­ting praise for Guy Kawasaki (who uses 10 slides with short words or phrases on them) or the “Taka­hashi Method” (using very large words). Another exam­ple of this is Lawrence Lessig’s well-regarded style. He uses a lot of slides with a small amount of text or sim­ple images, but he dis­plays them at a rapid rhythm. I find the visu­als in the few pre­sen­ta­tions of his I’ve looked at online to be mostly super­flu­ous, seem­ing to serve pri­mar­ily as a visual atten­tion grab­ber (give the audi­ence some­thing to look at) than as an addi­tional chan­nel of new infor­ma­tion. Though, I shouldn’t ignore the util­ity of slides as atten­tion grab­ber; it is a valid use.

  4. Slides carry presentation:

  This type of pre­sen­ta­tion is rarely seen at con­fer­ences. It belongs more to the clas­sic vaca­tion slideshow (“And this is the lit­tle cafe in Paris we went to on our first morn­ing”) or, in cur­rent times, watch­ing a slideshow from a Flickr photo set than to what some­one would expect from a pro­fes­sional pre­sen­ta­tion. This may be the appro­pri­ate style for cer­tain types of pre­sen­ta­tions, but one would need a good sense of design and visual nar­ra­tive to pull off some­thing like this suc­cess­fully. Infor­ma­tion that is process or space ori­ented might be the best can­di­dates for visu­ally dri­ven slides that require lit­tle added speech.

  Reader par­tic­i­pa­tion bonus sec­tion: Find me a good exam­ple of this in a presentation.

  5. Slides and speech share duties in con­vey­ing a point:

  I believe this is the ideal mode for most speech + slides pre­sen­ta­tions. When visu­ally appeal­ing slides com­ple­ment the speech, the pre­sen­ter can engage mul­ti­ple senses of the audi­ence mem­bers. The con­junc­tion of the mul­ti­ple chan­nels of words and image (sound and image) can cre­ate a syn­the­sized effect that is greater than each individual’s. This “wow,” sit-up-and-take-notice fac­tor is one of the joys of comics. Even in the most basic of comics, some­thing like a New Yorker sin­gle panel, the humor and the plea­sure of read­ing comes from the pic­ture and the text cre­at­ing some­thing that does not exist in either one inde­pen­dently. A sim­i­lar sense of plea­sure and cre­ation can come from the well planned slide/speech con­junc­tion, often through con­trast, metaphor, or unex­pected juxtaposition.

  The fol­low­ing comic, for instance, would not have the same effect if the text or image were viewed separately:

  

  Peter Arno from The New Yorker 12 Apr 1930

  For brevity’s sake, I must here ignore numer­ous other com­pli­ca­tions that arise from con­sid­er­ing the inter­ac­tion between speech, text on a slide, and image on a slide. I will also leave out much dis­cus­sion of how the rhythm with which the slides are changed can effect the pre­sen­ta­tion. The sim­plest of slides can be effec­tive if they are quickly moved through, while more detailed slides could retain inter­est for long peri­ods of time as speech is used to elab­o­rate on the visu­als (the clas­sic exam­ple I can think of is an art his­tory lec­ture where a sin­gle work is shown and dis­cussed at length, though even this can be improved with detail views.). As I noted above, Lawrence Lessig’s slides are often not very inter­est­ing in them­selves (a word or two), but he moves through them quickly enough that the viewer’s inter­est can be maintained.

  Many peo­ple seem to think slides need lots of text so the audi­ence can have some­thing to take home and re-visit or so peo­ple who didn’t make the pre­sen­ta­tion can take advan­tage of the presenter’s infor­ma­tion. Slides with lit­tle or no text would be mostly opaque on sub­se­quent view­ings. I would offer a few responses to this con­cern. A pre­sen­ta­tion is made for the audi­ence, the peo­ple who show up to lis­ten. A pre­sen­ta­tion done well should not be eas­ily boiled down to a mass of text (else, why not just write an arti­cle or a blog post). It should take advan­tage of its par­tic­u­lar form/media. The best method for re-visiting the pre­sen­ta­tion or archiv­ing for those unable to attend is a record­ing. Cheap options are avail­able to make mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tions avail­able online.

  When I pre­sented in Sec­ond Life a few months ago (which I talked a bit about in my pre­vi­ous post to this pub­li­ca­tion), I fol­lowed up by cre­at­ing a record­ing of my voice over the slides. In this case I re-created the pre­sen­ta­tion, record­ing a new ver­sion of my speech – rather than record­ing the orig­i­nal live – and then sync­ing it over the slides. In this way, an inter­ested party could watch my pre­sen­ta­tion in a form closer to the actual event than a sim­ple deck of slides.

  If you want to have a take away for the audi­ence, print­ing out your slides is a cop-out. There are bet­ter options. I’ve pre­vi­ously handed out (posted) my speak­ing notes as a com­ple­ment to slides, allow­ing for view­ers to at least get the main points I spoke about to accom­pany the slides. A sim­ple sheet (half-sheet if you want to con­serve paper) of main points and, if appro­pri­ate, urls or cita­tions can act as a reminder and ref­er­ence for atten­dees when they get back from the event.

  Cre­at­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion that uti­lizes an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of speech and slide does take more time and effort than a bul­leted list. Besides the con­cep­tual effort, the actual cre­ation of the slides can become time con­sum­ing. You can cre­ate your own images (draw­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, etc.), but even for those with­out such skills, plenty of options are avail­able to take advan­tage of other’s artis­tic work. Free pho­tos are avail­able through var­i­ous Cre­ative Com­mons sites (like Flickr’s) and there are numer­ous options for clip art – good clip art (check out the many options from Dover books) not that clip art that comes with MS Office [5].

  The pre­sen­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion should be impor­tant to our pro­fes­sion. After all, the fourth of the ACRL Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Stan­dards includes:

  3. The infor­ma­tion lit­er­ate stu­dent com­mu­ni­cates the prod­uct or per­for­mance effec­tively to oth­ers.
  Out­comes Include:
  A. Chooses a com­mu­ni­ca­tion medium and for­mat that best sup­ports the pur­poses of the prod­uct or per­for­mance and the intended audi­ence
  B. Uses a range of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy appli­ca­tions in cre­at­ing the prod­uct or per­for­mance
  C. Incor­po­rates prin­ci­ples of design and com­mu­ni­ca­tion
  D. Com­mu­ni­cates clearly and with a style that sup­ports the pur­poses of the intended audience

  I’m not sure how directly prac­ti­cal all of the above is, but I hope it at least gets peo­ple think­ing about the topic. Pre­sen­ta­tions can be inter­est­ing for many dif­fer­ent rea­sons, and one of them is the form. I real­ize some of the forms above might be too “arty” for most pre­sen­ta­tions, but I don’t think it is out­side the realm of rea­son to add more art to our con­fer­ences. Art can con­vey infor­ma­tion as well (if not bet­ter) than dry tech­ni­cal work. Cre­ativ­ity should never be over­looked in our work.

  Next time you are mak­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion, set aside extra time to work on your slides, not just to make them but to think about them and how they will inter­act with what you will say. If we chal­lenge our­selves and our audi­ences, we will not only have more inter­est­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, but we will all get our brains work­ing a lit­tle more.

  Fur­ther Reading:

  There are tons of books and web­sites about slides and pre­sen­ta­tions and the dreaded Pow­er­point. There are also hun­dreds of books on design. You can also learn a lot from just look­ing at art and design and exam­ples of great pre­sen­ta­tions. You might start with: Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen.

  Thanks to Aaron Schmidt, Kim Leeder, and Ellie Col­lier for com­ments on the con­tent and Lianne Hart­man for editing.

  Image Cred­its:

  “Sheena” image is in the pub­lic domain. Draw­ing by Robert Webb. “I Guess” image copy­right Chris Ware. Arno comic copy­right The New Yorker.

  Notes:

  [1] I’ll admit that we could con­sider a speaker’s move­ments and body lan­guage a third fac­tor, but that’s a whole other topic, one that is rarely put to use in librar­ian pre­sen­ta­tions I’ve seen. This is a chan­nel of infor­ma­tion that is par­tic­u­larly miss­ing in the webi­nar format.

  [2] Quoted from: Kun­zle, David. His­tory of the Comic Strip vol. 2: The Nine­teenth Cen­tury. Berke­ley, CA: Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia Press, 1990. 46.

  [3] Bor­row­ing a bit from Scott McCloud’s Under­stand Comics where he describes and names a num­ber of image-text interactions.

  [4] From Raw 2.3 (1991).

  [5] I’m told there is a good col­lec­tion in Word from iStock Pho­tos. It’s not on my Mac, so I haven’t seen it.
  

  You might also be inter­ested in:

  • Pro-Con-ference
  • Learn­ing to teach through video
  • Get­ting to Know You
  • Why isn’t a pic­ture worth a thou­sand words?
  • What Not to Do When Apply­ing for Library Jobs
  Tags: comics, design, presentations, slides

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17 Comments

• Derik Badman says:

  December 17, 2008 at 10:00 am

  Austin Kleon reminded me of this post at his blog about pow­er­point and comics:

  http://​www​.austin​kleon​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​0​5​/​1​3​/​f​o​r​-​s​u​c​c​e​s​s​f​u​l​-​p​o​w​e​r​p​o​i​n​t​-​p​r​e​s​e​n​t​a​t​i​o​n​s​-​l​o​o​k​-​t​o​-​c​a​r​t​o​o​n​i​s​ts/

  I wish I would have remem­bered that while work­ing on my post.

  Reply
• Derik Badman says:

  December 17, 2008 at 10:04 am

  Austin links to a talk with Scott McCloud about pow­er­point and comics. Great quote:

  CA: What sort of pac­ing works for you?

  SM: I really like to keep up with the speed of thought. I would much rather my audi­ence be a half-second behind than five min­utes ahead. Pow­er­Point gives me that abil­ity if I want to really load that visual carousel and zap through them as fast as I can.

  When you have those text heavy slides and you are read­ing them aloud, the audi­ence is five min­utes ahead.

  Reply
• Jenny says:

  December 17, 2008 at 10:42 am

  A major pet peeve of mine is the Pow­er­Point print­out that accom­pa­nies a pre­sen­ta­tion. Wouldn’t an out­line get the job done just as well, and take up less paper? Just yes­ter­day I went to a work­shop that had this, along with a huge amount of sup­ple­men­tal hand­outs. The result was a large sheaf of papers that was cum­ber­some and time-consuming when it came to navigation.

  Reply
• Austin Kleon says:

  December 17, 2008 at 10:49 am

  I HIGHLY rec­om­mend Nancy Duarte’s new book, slide:ology. Not only is it the best book on slide pre­sen­ta­tions I’ve ever read, it’s also a crash course in design, with great sec­tions on color and com­po­si­tion. Check it out!

  Reply
• walt crawford says:

  December 17, 2008 at 11:31 am

  Some of us do still do speeches with­out PPT…unless the topic absolutely, 100% requires visuals.

  But then, half of my speeches over the last decades have been keynotes, and I’m not really speak­ing much any more. So maybe your semi-dismissal of the non-PPT approach is appropriate.

  As for PPT print­outs: Can’t we at least “green” con­fer­ences enough to skip those and let peo­ple look at them on the web? Talk about waste paper…

  Reply
• walt crawford says:

  December 17, 2008 at 12:28 pm

  Another quick note: Your arti­cle is so good that I’ve excerpted it (very brief excerpts) as a new sec­tion in the PALINET Lead­er­ship Net­work arti­cle “Pre­sen­ta­tions.”

  Reply
• Derik Badman says:

  December 17, 2008 at 12:33 pm

  Jenny: I have to agree. And it’s not very green either.

  Austin: My library has Slide:ology on order, I look for­ward to read­ing it.

  Walt: Thanks for the linking/quotation.

  Reply
• Trista says:

  December 17, 2008 at 12:38 pm

  What a fresh way to look at slide pre­sen­ta­tions! I have read so much lately about how to improve your pre­sen­ta­tions, but felt that much of it has been said before. Tying in comic books to illus­trate your argu­ment is bril­liant and makes the infor­ma­tion stick so much bet­ter. I’m look­ing for­ward to using these ideas in my next ppt.
  Thanks

  Reply
• Brett Bonfield says:

  December 17, 2008 at 12:44 pm

  As far as an exam­ple of #4 goes, this may be cheat­ing, but what about David Heine­meier Hansson’s first Ruby on Rails video? It’s still avail­able at http://​www​.ruby​on​rails​.com/​s​c​r​e​e​n​c​a​sts — just look for the screen­cast for Ruby on Rails 0.5.

  In my mind, this pre­sen­ta­tion, ca. 2004 or 2005, was prob­a­bly the land­mark moment for Ruby, Rails, and screen­cast­ing. It’s funny, though: watch­ing it now is a bit like watch­ing the orig­i­nal Star Wars. I remem­bered an audio track in the Rails video, but I guess I was wrong, because there isn’t one. It’s just DHH installing Rails and cre­at­ing an app.

  Back to your point: this pre­sen­ta­tion is process-oriented, as you noted in dis­cussing “Slides Carry Pre­sen­ta­tion,” and it’s also not a deck of slides, it’s a screen­cast. But it’s also a nice reminder that some­times the best thing a pre­sen­ter can do is elim­i­nate com­men­tary and let a process or space speak for itself.

  Reply
• Ann Wilberton says:

  December 17, 2008 at 4:25 pm

  I loved this post. It pro­vided an inter­est­ing take on art of the slide pre­sen­ta­tion. I’ve been away from librar­i­an­ship for 3 years and recently returned.

  I have been sur­prised by the num­ber of folks who post their pre­sen­ta­tions online. This prac­tice would be infor­ma­tive except that fre­quently there is no accom­pa­ny­ing notes or audio. Slides with one or two words or just a pic­ture are great live while you are there to hear the speaker. But, later, as an online resource, they are basi­cally use­less. It has become a frus­trat­ing result when search­ing for cur­rent thought on library issues.

  I encour­age folks to add notes or audio to make them truly use­ful for folks who did not attend their orig­i­nal presentation.

  Reply
• stevenb says:

  December 17, 2008 at 9:48 pm

  Nice job on your post Derik — a good way to think about dif­fer­ent approaches to pre­sent­ing. You may want to watch a video of a Seth Godin pre­sen­ta­tion. Based on your cat­e­go­riza­tions it may be his is of the Lessig type. But it’s a rapid fire series of slides — mostly all images that are timed to fit near pre­cisely with his text — so you are con­stantly sub­jected to new images — a num­ber of which are pretty amus­ing — and his dis­cus­sion of the top­ics. The images don’t always match the text but most will. It’s clearly a well chore­o­graphed pre­sen­ta­tion — beyond the time most librar­i­ans can put into pre­sen­ta­tion prepa­ra­tion. But he really engages the audi­ence. What about video in pre­sen­ta­tions? I have been try­ing it. It gives me a short break to regroup and it can set up a dis­cus­sion within the pre­sen­ta­tion. Most pre­sen­ta­tions exclude the atten­dees. What style might be best to engage them in the pre­sen­ta­tion as participants?

  Reply
• Derik Badman says:

  December 18, 2008 at 10:30 am

  Thanks, Steven. I found this recent pre­sen­ta­tion by Godin, and based on that one, he is using his speech and slides in an com­pli­men­tary way more so than what I’ve seen of Lessig’s pre­sen­ta­tion. He’s not chang­ing too rapidly in that exam­ple, but he is often using images that are rel­e­vant to his speech but not in a direct word for word correlation.

  I really don’t have an opin­ion about videos in pre­sen­ta­tions. Haven’t seen it hap­pen very often. A lot would depend on how much the video is appro­pri­ate. Is it just fill­ing time or is it really adding something.

  I think the more the slide-speech inter­ac­tion is get­ting the audi­ence to make con­nec­tions and to think, the more they are engaged. But that’s not in iso­la­tion of just plain old inter­est­ing and engag­ing top­ics (which, if lack­ing, makes all of these styles pointless).

  Reply
• Laura Z says:

  December 18, 2008 at 10:06 pm

  I like the con­cept of hav­ing the hand­out be its own take-home thing sep­a­rate from what/how you may be pre­sent­ing. This seems so obvi­ous and yet is a big “duh” to me.

  I also liked that you said “The pre­sen­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion should be impor­tant to our pro­fes­sion.” I think it actu­ally would behoove infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als to take act­ing lessons and com­mu­ni­ca­tions classes. I’m just saying.

  Reply
• ellie says:

  December 23, 2008 at 2:15 pm

  Thanks for this Derik. The major­ity of my pre­sen­ta­tions end up going live to the soft­ware I’m talk­ing about, or using screen shots if I’ve planned that far ahead. This does make for very lit­tle to give to peo­ple as take-aways or for them to see when I post my pre­sen­ta­tion later. Record­ing the audio track will go on my future to do lists.

  Reply
• Kathryn Greenhill says:

  December 24, 2008 at 5:52 am

  Hi Derik. Nice arti­cle. Thank you.

  Just FYI, I have cre­ated a very video-heavy pre­sen­ta­tion. I was talk­ing to a mob of art librar­i­ans about Sec­ond Life, and wanted to keep the pre­sen­ta­tion tight. I made sep­a­rate machin­ima and inter­spersed it through­out my talk… 1) A fly­ing tour of Info Island. 2) A tour through an Art Gar­llery on Info Island Two and then a tour through the Museum of Music to show how good inter­ac­tive design can be used in Sec­ond Life exhibits 3) An avatar walk­ing through and inter­act­ing with an art instal­la­tion funded with a $20K Aus­tralia Coun­cil grant. … I spoke over these bits, so nei­ther the talk­ing or visual part of the pre­sen­ta­tion would have worked in isolation.

  I also included lots and lots of screen­shots that I used to illus­trate my points as I talked.

  The night before most of my pre­sen­ta­tions, I open up Audac­ity, slip on a head­set and record my talk exactly as I intend to do it. I can then quickly make a slide­cast if I have time. I think of that as my hand­out. It also means that if some­one asks me months and months later to give the same or sim­i­lar talk, I under­stand what all the slides mean … I never write a text out­line of what I am going to say…

  Reply
• caleb says:

  January 8, 2009 at 5:48 pm

  I loved this post, thanks a lot. Some of the best pre­sen­ta­tions I’ve been to assume that the audi­ence is smart, and can make a few leaps between what’s on the screen and what the speaker is saying.

  From the exception-that-proves-the-rule depart­ment, when you are giv­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion at an inter­na­tional con­fer­ence (and I rec­om­mend this highly), many peo­ple in the audi­ence may not be native speak­ers of the con­fer­ence lin­gua franca and it is a good idea to sum­ma­rize your talk in bul­let points on slides so that every­one can fol­low what you are saying.

  Good com­mu­ni­ca­tion is full of nuance, and it sucks to not under­stand what some­one is say­ing just because they think bul­let points in Pow­er­Point are evil.

  And um yeah, I was the guy who did it wrong.

  Reply
• Derik Badman says:

  January 9, 2009 at 11:54 am

  Caleb: In a mul­ti­lin­gual sit­u­a­tion, I might, instead of putting sum­maries on the slides, make sure hand­outs are avail­able of notes/summaries for peo­ple to fol­low along, that way I could still use inter­est­ing slides with­out neg­a­tively affect­ing some of the audi­ences comprehension.

  Reply