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calmooyesterday at 9:55 PM3 repliesview on HN

I watched this years ago and really enjoyed it. One of the main lessons I took from it is basically, have almost 0 text on your slides. You should not be reading your slides, the audience should not have to read your slides. The slides should supplement what you are speaking about, not vice versa.

Any time I see a wall of text on a presentation, I know I can probably tune out and not miss much.


Replies

Aurornistoday at 1:46 AM

This is great advice for the right context, but can be the wrong advice for different situations.

If the slide deck is meant to be something that can be shared around and make sense without you, it needs to have a lot of text on the slides. Even putting it in the speaker notes doesn’t work.

So make sure you know your audience and the context (also important presentation advice)

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neilvtoday at 12:32 AM

One downside to not having much text on your slides is that the slides alone are then not as useful as a reference to attendees later.

When I do low-text slides anyway, sometimes I've used the "notes" field of the presentation program to write out complete text of a version of the speech, for my eyes only. Then I don't read the notes while presenting, but I've gone through that writing exercise, to think through the content and presentation more rigorously than is necessary to slap some headings on slides.

busyantyesterday at 11:10 PM

Someone told me something similar once:

When giving a talk, your slides are not "the show." YOU are the show.

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