POWERPOINT TEXT OVERLOAD: RESEARCH MAKES A POINT

PowerPoint Presenting Skills

Typically you choose to use PowerPoint in your presentation for several reasons:

1) To help your audience to understand.

2) To help your audience to learn.

3) To help you to get your message across.

But have you ever thought about what happens when you build too much information into your slides?

Multimedia Learning Research

Research (Richard E Mayer, The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning-Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology) shows that your audience has a problem when it tries to assimilate the same information from two different sources...at the same time.

"What happens when you build too much information into your slides?"

The problem occurs when you fill your PowerPoint slides with bullet point lists or paragraphs of text and then start to read out the projected text.

What happens is that your audience tries to read the text on the screen – at one speed. And, at a different speed, they try to listen to you reading the same text. The result? Confusion.

Presenting to a Confused Audience

When members of your audience become confused they switch off. Their working memories have become overloaded and they have become frustrated. As a presenter, it's not the reaction you want.

There are two ways for a presenter to achieve better results. First, cut the text from your slides. And second, stop reading the text that you do leave in.

To find out how you can prepare your presentations without a reliance on text you can contact us now on 01276 804 633 or email: training@timetomarket.co.uk

"The idea behind most of these briefings is for us to sit through 100 slides with our eyes glazed over, and then to do what all military organizations hope for ... to surrender to an overwhelming mass."

Richard Danzig, Navy Secretary