What is worse than someone reading PowerPoint slides to an audience?
Someone who also never looks at the audience.
If you are giving a PowerPoint presentation, it is very easy to become glued to your slides–and to stay looking at your slides even when what you are saying is not there! Here are three tips for avoiding that dilemma.
Be Aware of Your Toes
Sounds silly, but it is true that if your toes are pointed at the screen, you will definitely wind up reading the screen and losing your audience. However, when your toes are pointed toward the audience, or are catty-corner to the audience, that position will serve you well in two ways. First,it allows you to glance at the screen for your information. Second, because your bodys want to turn in the direction of your toes, you will naturally find yourself turning from the slides to look at your audience.
Use Bullets
Avoid putting sentences on your slides. Sentences act as eye-magnets. They makes us want to read all the words in them and the exercise turns into remedial reading for your listeners. Stick to bullet points. Because short phrases are easier to grasp at a glance, you are less likely to get stuck on the slide. Compare having to present A or B below to a group and you’ll appreciate the difference immediately.
(A) Presenting from a sentence
When you have something to say on a slide, it is a good idea to use as few words as possible and to reduce them to bullets.
(B) Presenting from bullets
- Few words
- Bullet points
Get Rid of the Words Altogether!
A picture is worth a thousand words. Use an image as your cue so you can focus your eye contact on your listeners. For example, if you were presenting the information in this blog post to an audience, instead of words, you could just have a slide headed “How to Focus on Your Audience” with three images on it: a pair of feet, bullet points, and an actual picture.
The images would automatically tell you what you wanted to say. Images also allow you to speak in a more conversational and engaging way to your audience.
Bottom-line, listeners do not want to watch your back as you read slides to them. In addition to knowing your material, these tips are guaranteed to improve your delivery and foster a strong connection between you and your audience.
Anne Miller
Words Matter – Make What You Say Pay!
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