PowerPoint: Stories, Not Bullets

Not everyone who can make type on a keyboard is a writer. Writing is a skill that’s learned through practice. Writing well isn’t easy and it doesn’t come naturally. So I teach people how to write.  Clearly. Concisely. How to give presentations. How to write the presentations they give, using PowerPoint.

Poor PowerPoint. It’s been so misused, I may have to open a shelter for abused PowerPoint

Seth Godin's book is a starting point for help, but it won't write your presentation for you.

presentations. You know them–the ones with overloaded slides. With charts that need an engineer and an explanation to make sense. With all those bullet points.

You thought bullet points were the cure, right? You thought they were the solution to bad PowerPoint. Nope. They are one of the ways to ruin a PowerPoint presentation

Although I teach a full-day course on writing and designing effective PowerPoint presentations, here are  five quick tips on how to improve your PowerPoint presentations. Today. If you follow these five steps your next PowerPoint will be better than your last.

1.Don’t do what you hate seeing. What do you hate about other people’s PowerPoint presentations? Write down the three worst things people do. Then don’t do any of them. The ones I see most often are: too many bullets, no story development, horrible design.

2. PowerPoint was never designed to be report-writing software. Using it that way will ruin your presentation and give you a lousy report at the same time. PowerPoint was designed to have engineers talk to marketing. It’s a presentation software. Use it for that. What about the report? Well, if you do your presentation right, you will also be able to generate the report, but not in the same step.

3. Start with the story. Don’t start by opening PowerPoint and designing the slide. That’s not the story. If you start creating your presentation by opening PowerPoint, you get caught up in design instead of story. Presentations are always about the story. PowerPoint is a presentation aid. It helps you add visuals and emphasis, helps people remember what you said, influences their thinking, but it cannot be the content-carrier. Providing content is your job. How do you write a good story? Best way to start is to ask yourself: What do I want the people to think/do/believe when I’m done?

4. Stop using bullets. Most bullet points are unrelated topic headings that presenters use to know what to say next. That information belongs in the “Notes” section of PowerPoint. If you’ve never heard of the Notes section, don’t do another presentation until you’ve learned the good side of this powerful software. Most people put information that belongs in Notes on the screen. That’s the fast track to losing your audience.

5. Use images that help tell your story. For example, which makes you more interested in the topic of “Summertime home repairs”–a slide that reads:

Tips for Summertime Home Repairs

• Time home repairs to suit the heat
• Don’t paint wood that gets full sun in a.m.
• Wood will warp when sun dries paint

A picture adds to your words in ways explanations cannot.

Or seeing this photo, while the presenter says, “Home repair is tricky when it gets hot. Wood soaks up paint. The sun dries it, but it also warps it, giving you a white picket fence that needs braces.”

The objection I hear most often is, “Well, where do I get pictures I can afford?” It always makes me smile. It makes me realize that most people write PowerPoint with only half the tools–words, but no photos or planned images.

Often the words are as poorly planned as the images, but words are free, so they are made to substitute for images.

In the day-long class, we look at your past PowerPoints and see what went wrong, learn what a PowerPoint can (and can’t) do for you and for the audience, dig for the purpose of your presentation, learn the basics of telling a story, choosing effective colors for your presentation, how to find and use photos, designing charts and graphs for presentations (because you can’t use the same one you used in the report), and, yes, when to use bullets in your presentation. You’ll learn the five biggest mistakes and how to avoid them, when to use a slide and how to use PowerPoint to make your presentation work for you, rather than be your presentation that you are enslaved to delivering.

--Quinn McDonald is a writing instructor who helps people design and give powerful presentations. See all of her training topics. (c) QuinnCreative, Quinn McDonald, 2009