A good example of this advice that spurred me to jot this post down is given at Presentation Advisors in the post Reducing the Amount of Text on your PowerPoint Slides. There’s much good advice in this post; e.g., “Filling slides with useless text can be detrimental to your presentation’s health… since the audience can’t read and listen at the same time, they’ll sometimes do neither”.

The important and valuable advice here (that’s also well-grounded in lots of research) is that you don’t want the listener to be trying to read and listen to text at the same time. So keep the amount of printed text low; most of the content and detail should be in what the speaker says. Excellent advice, I think.

But agreeing to that doesn’t entail adopting slides with the minimal amout of text on them. The valuable point is that the amount of reading should be minimal compared to the amount of listening. So my 55 minutes of 100-words-per-minute talking (5500 words if you’re keeping score at home) should be accompanied by a pretty small number of written words. Suppose I follow this plan and get my number of printed words down to, say, 200.

Great. But that doesn’t resolve whether those 200 words should be (more or less) 50 four-word slides, or 4 fifty-word slides. We’ve agreed to keep text down to about 4 printed words per minute. The question now is about how those words should be shown. And to answer that, the question has to be asked: What’s the point of having words up there at all?

Images and drawings have their place, and for people who are selling rather than teaching, or teaching certain kinds of material, pictures may matter a lot. But for those of us who are teaching, and especially teaching abstractly described rather than concretely pictured points (like me, a philosophy teacher), you’re going to want words — key concepts and terminology, important questions, conclusions, and steps along the way.

In short, you often want the words up there to summarize where you are in the medium-to-big picture; to remind them of their current place in the macro-level structure of the discussion; to keep telling them that the ephemera of what you happen to be saying right that second is significant because of the place it holds in the larger-scale discussion of the topic being considered. When it comes to words on the overhead, it’s all about summarizing and locating where you are.

So why not just a handout? Handouts have their place as well, and sometimes a handout is better. But often a lecture tells a story and takes you from one place to another; with a handout, the later chapters of the story are in front of them already, which may well undermine your ability to tell the story in the best way possible. I want the students to feel the force of an argument for a view, or an objection to that argument; a handout allows them to see exactly where we’re going, and relax about whether the current twist of logic might be the last word or not.

None of this means the more Lessig-ish style can’t work for some things, or that we should backslide into long discursive slides that have students tuning out just to read the text in front of them. But it does mean we should be careful about a potentially illegitimate inference from the reasonable advice of “minimize the ratio of projected words to spoken words” to the conclusion “minimize the number of words per overhead”. There are a variety of styles that embrace the good “minimize audience reading” advice; and not all of them minimize the amount of text per slide.

Update: There’s some thoughtful comments and discussion on this issue and this post over at Presentation Advisors‘ original post.

The posts from here and my course pages (PHI111 and PHI416/516) will all show up (shortened, of course) at profon at twitter.

Just a little experiment.

As someone who’s done this a lot and for a long while, I often get asked about it by colleagues and grad students. So, I’ve jotted down a few things here to answer those questions for them and anybody else who stumbles across this. Make use of the information however you like.

Content/formatting:

Some of this is standard; some is stuff I’ve learned by trial and error; some is non-standard views that are IMHO superior to the conventional wisdom — especially for the college classroom, with has different demands than the “standard” business presentation. My job isn’t 20 minutes of getting them excited; it’s 40 hours spread over 15 weeks of teaching them some substance that they will be tested on.

Density and pacing:  I use slides with more text and more bullets than the current trends suggest, and then I go through them quite slowly; each slide might have 8-10 bulleted points on it, with the points averaging 8-10 words each, and with me spending 10 minutes on the slide — so, roughly 1 minute per point, with me lecturing at least 10 words for every word on the overhead.

Keep in mind that the overheads are macro structure, not advertising imagery, so don’t be afraid to put a fair number of items on a slide. Conventional wisdom for business meetings is to keep the amount of text on a slide very low, but for in-class use, students are way more bothered by the slides changing too fast than by having lots on a slide. Just don’t whip through them.  One 8-word bullet per minute is about as fast as I let it get.  That lets me read the item and say another 10x as many words explaining it before moving on the the next item. 

Visual formatting: Here is a sample of a typical PowerPoint template that I use; feel free to take it, use it, modify it, or whatever.

Some comments on the template and on on formatting for class in general:

• Use white text on a black background, and yellow or some other light color when you want a contrast color. Don’t use “pretty” backgrounds, or background colors other than black. It might seem cool at first, but it gets real old in a big hurry. You want to maximize readability, not make a work of art.
• Stick to standard fonts, and preferably non-serif fonts, and keep them in bold. Think about those big green highway signs, where the fonts are picked for maximal readability, even at a distance. My usual font is Tahoma Bold. If you use a font that isn’t on every machine, you run the risk of finding your layout all screwed up when you get to class. (You can pack the fonts in the presentation, but I’ve found this to be very erratic.)
• Set the slides to build, so that a new click introduces a single bulleted item; if you keep the thing you’re talking about at the bottom of the visible items, then they won’t get distracted by reading ahead. And don’t use “Dim Previous Items”; it just reduces readability. And use a consistent entry effect, or none at all; mixing it up is just more distraction.
• Don’t put animated images up unless you really need them to illustrate some bit of content; if you leave an extraneous animation up, their eyes will just keep jumping to it.

In general: Fewer, visually simpler, higher-contrast, but higher-content slides.

Posting the overheads:  PowerPoint still sucks after all these years in terms of producing decent plain HTML for posting. I think the best (but not perfect) fairly easy solution is to use “File/Save As” to save the presentation to an RTF file, load that into MS Word, tweak it a little if you want, and then save it as “Web Page, Filtered”. The HTML generated this way is — if not exactly clean — pretty usable for posting, allthough the bullets are a little funny in non-IE browsers.

Gadgets and the like:

Why don’t they put flash memory in all remotes? For about 3 years my preferred and recommended basic gadget was the SmartDisk PowerPlay Pro wireless remote controller and receiver with 32MB of flash memory built in. Go in, plug in a single USB stick, and you have your presentation and controller all set. But now it’s almost impossible to find a remote that has even some tiny bit of memorybuilt in, so I mostly resort to using a pretty standard Targus controller, and separate flash memory thumbdrive for the presentation, and bring along a really tiny USB hub just in case I run into a machine with only one easily available USB socket.

Other files/software to bring to class

I carry some other files to class on the USB stick that can be useful. Here’s my suggestions:

Other class content files: It never hurts to carry an electronic copy of the syllabus, as well as the presentations from the last time you taught the class, if you have them. If something goes wrong with the new thing, it never hurts to have a backup to teach from.

Other software: There are bits of software that you can run from a USB drive that you might not find on the classroom computer which can be helpful. Here are a couple I carry on the USB drive (and the small CD-R).

• Neutron Time Synchronizer: Check time from standard time servers and reset system’s time.
• Transparent Clock and DS Clock: A couple of sizable and configurable on-screen digital clocks.

If you care about such things, you should check out the Portable Freeware Collection, for lots of free software that you can run from removable drives.

Other Resources and Opinions:

Finally, here are some links to resources on creating and using PowerPoint presentations. I don’t agree with everything they say, but they’re useful resources anyway.

• Particletree PowerPoint and Presentation Tips
• Presentation Zen
• Presenters University
• Powerful Pointers for Presenters
• Beyond Bullets
• Garr Reynolds/Presentations
• Creating Presentation Visuals