Slide makeover: 5 steps to replace boring bullets with audience awe

During your professional life, you’ve no doubt seen more slides with bullet lists on them than any other type of slide. The problem is, so have your audiences, too.

You can’t inspire a disengaged audience…

Because audiences see wordy bullet lists a lot, they’re disengaged by them instantly. And, despite your best efforts, you can’t inspire a disengaged audience to act on what you say!

So how can you use fewer bullet lists? Let’s work through an example to see what you could do instead, using this bullet-filled slide as a starting point:

This is what the slide will look like when you finish the makeover:

And here are the 5 steps you can use to complete that overhaul:

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Improve each time you present – Great tips by @CharlesGreene3 on getting feedback

Hands up if you’d like to improve your public speaking – each time you do a presentation. Well here’s some great tips from speaking coach Charles Greene for doing just that.

He suggests you hand out a feedback form every time you present. And Charles even published the 8 questions he asks his own audiences after every talk.

To save time and effort, just use Charles’s questions

So to save yourself time and effort, you could just use Charles’s questions instead of “reinventing the wheel”. (Thank you, Charles, for sharing generously.)

I really like that Charles asks just 8 questions, so most people will be happy to respond. And most of his form simply asks people to rate his talk on a fixed scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” (a Likert scale) against various criteria. For instance, his 1^st question asks people the degree to which they agree that:

How to link to any page in a PDF – say, from your presentation’s electronic handout

Here’s a tip for content to put in your handout: Give people links to useful resources, like to PDF documents on the web. And not only that: When you link to a PDF, did you know you can easily link to any page? So, no more sending people to page 1 and making them find the right page themselves!

When you link straight to the right page, you get 3 clear benefits: