Chapter 1 - Tweaking Presentations

In the book, They Snooze You Lose, the principles espoused in the first chapter reminded me of conversations with a friend that is the owner of a small advertising agency. He stated that PowerPoint was an ineffective tool in its delivery of presentations because of the constraints of the application and limited vision of presenters, the template generation. Many of the preconceived templates with their varieties of fonts, colors, and backgrounds distract from the intended message. Neophytes consistently choose ill conceived templates that are bland, distracting, or just plain bad. I have done it as well. In addition, he would remind me that most folks think that they are great writers but they fail to communicate in language that is easily understandable by diverse professionals. For example, why use a GRE or SAT analogy word when a simpler one will do the job. In our efforts to impress with our haughty use of language quite often we fly over the heads of the audience. How often do you hear the word haughty in conversation? Precisely. When that happens, no person in the audience is going to raise their hand that they did not understand. Colors, colors, colors! The text did a good job of expressing the value of color and its impact with text. Quite often, we stick with the standard black text on the white screen, which has become the defacto standard. Unfortunately, it does not evoke any passion or reconnect the audience with the presentation after the fact. Keenly placing the appropriate color on the best background can evoke emotions and memory recall. I thought the reference to Monet was quite clever to depict how color can be utilized. References Burmark, L. (2011), They Snooze You Lose: The Educator's Guide To Successful Presentations