5 ms·

Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a presentation, and separately as a way to learn or review material outside of the presentation. Unfortunately t

Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a presentation, and separately as a way to learn or review material outside of the presentation. Unfortunately they are at cross-purposes. For accompanying an oral presentation you don't want lots of data, you want a simple clear image that sync with what you are saying, and to change them rapidly. For learning outside the actual presentation, you want rich, detailed slides with lots of data on them, and leave them up for a while so people can absorb the information. Ideally, we would build two different decks, each optimized for their purpose. But no one has time for that, so people try and do both in one deck, generally going with lots of information except for one or two images keyed to specific jokes. And it makes the whole thing less effective.

andrecarini 2y ago
Ideally you'd have slides purely for presentation, and an accompanying interactive self-contained HTML document for the documentation of the talk.
- ghaff 2y ago
  And nobody wants to do both (or has the incentive to do both). I'll do sorta-both but probably in an informal way--e.g. article that grew out of a talk--or vice versa.
  - simonw 2y ago
    I've been doing annotated versions of my talks for a while, takes. Few hours of extra effort but greatly increases the impact the talk can have: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotatedtalks/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotatedtalks/
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Maybe it's because I write a lot but I reached the conclusion that if it makes sense to do an article/blog, I should do so rather than speaker notes--which make sense in handing off a presentation to someone else in a company setting but I'm less sold on, in general, as a personal thing.
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
Handouts and speaker notes are a thing, although people rarely use them both when building presentations and when reviewing them later.
kelnos 2y ago
> Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a presentation... Many years ago I went to a presentation on giving good presentations, focusing on making good slide decks. (It's currently annoying me that I can't remember where this was, even though I can picture the room in my head.) The presenter had a short example slide deck, and gave a mock technical presentation using it. The deck had a different, eye-catching background image for each slide, chosen to be noticeable, but not dominate attention, and be well-suited color-wise for any text or images to be placed on top of the background. The presenter suggested that the background image didn't need to have anything to do with the content of the slide, and that it's mainly there for its general visual impact. The slides were not uniformly designed. It wasn't like someone had used a template where the title, text, images, etc. were all in the same or similar places on each slide. The most noticeable part of this was putting the title in different places. This variety was in itself engaging. The slides themselves were very light on text, and were mostly about presenting charts, graphs, tabular data, or images relevant to the talk. When there was text, the presenter never read the text verbatim (or sometimes even at all); the text there was a jumping-off point to discuss in detail whatever the topic of the slide was. The argument there was that people know how to read, can read in their heads faster than you can read to them out loud, and if you're just going to read slides to them, you don't need to present it and you should instead just email a document for your attendees to read, and skip the presentation entirely. Finally, the slide deck itself did not have all that many slides. The presenter dwelled on each slide a lot longer than I've seen in most presentations. The slides were more guideposts to mark the overall topics and outline of the presentation, to provide milestones and transitions. For the most part, the presentation could have been done without the slides at all; the slides were there to add visual flair, help keep attention, and (occasionally) prevent data or images that would be easier to understand visually rather than spoken. Ultimately I found the mock presentation given to be incredibly engaging, much more so than the vast majority of presentations I'd attended before or have attended since, and I remember that the topic wasn't even something that would usually hold my interest so tightly. I very rarely gave/give presentations, but I've tried to take all this to heart when I had the opportunity to do so. I don't think I ever really did the variety-of-background-images thing (honestly, I never enjoyed giving presentations, and treated it as a chore, and never felt motivated enough to find a bunch of suitable background images). But I at least always tried to keep text to a minimum, so the meat of my talk would be in what I was saying out loud. I wouldn't call myself a particularly good presenter or public speaker, but I think my talks were better than they otherwise would have been. > Slides have two distinct purposes: [...] as a way to learn or review material outside of the presentation I've come to think that slides aren't very good for this second purpose, and probably shouldn't be. The information density is never going to be high enough, and if it is, that's going to make for a terrible slide during the presentation. I would much rather read a transcript of the talk later, or, better, a detailed summary. If the slides have charts or other data, then sure, it's useful to have those outside of the talk, but those can also be inserted in-line into the transcript or summary. I get that it's more work to write up a transcript or summary (and I know I myself would probably balk at having to do this), but if you've prepared properly for the presentation, you probably already more or less have something approaching a transcript in your talk notes. Cleaning them up for publication isn't zero effort, of course, but it should be much less work than writing something from scratch.
aadhavans 2y ago
I think bullet points capture the worst of both worlds. You have text (which people focus on, rather than on the presenter), but you don't have enough that one could learn from them outside the presentation. There's a saying that bullet points are called so because they 'kill' a presentation, and I think there's some truth to that.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  I think short bullet points are great. That way the audience can take them in quickly (I highlight one at a time to prevent them from reading ahead/behind) without being distracted for more than a fraction of a second. It also helps people to see how many items are being discussed (e.g., "there are three reasons that language X is better than language Y"). For me at least, that makes it easier to remember the reasons, since it functions as a checksum.
- stoperaticless 2y ago
  Do you mean that full paragraph is better? Strong disagree if so.
  - aadhavans 2y ago
    Perhaps not full paragraphs, but the phrase-style nature of bullet points has never really helped me understand the material. If there must be text, I would rather see complete sentences on a presentation. I've used the assertion-evidence framework[0] for presentations[1] before, where the idea is to have a complete sentence at the top of your slide, with images below that illustrate your point. [0] https://www.assertion-evidence.com/ https://www.assertion-evidence.com/ [1] While these presentations _were_ about engineering, they were more educational than technical in nature.

andrecarini 2y ago

Ideally you'd have slides purely for presentation, and an accompanying interactive self-contained HTML document for the documentation of the talk.

ghaff 2y ago
And nobody wants to do both (or has the incentive to do both). I'll do sorta-both but probably in an informal way--e.g. article that grew out of a talk--or vice versa.
- simonw 2y ago
  I've been doing annotated versions of my talks for a while, takes. Few hours of extra effort but greatly increases the impact the talk can have: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotatedtalks/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotatedtalks/
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Maybe it's because I write a lot but I reached the conclusion that if it makes sense to do an article/blog, I should do so rather than speaker notes--which make sense in handing off a presentation to someone else in a company setting but I'm less sold on, in general, as a personal thing.

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

Handouts and speaker notes are a thing, although people rarely use them both when building presentations and when reviewing them later.

kelnos 2y ago

> Slides have two distinct purposes: as a part of a presentation... Many years ago I went to a presentation on giving good presentations, focusing on making good slide decks. (It's currently annoying me that I can't remember where this was, even though I can picture the room in my head.) The presenter had a short example slide deck, and gave a mock technical presentation using it. The deck had a different, eye-catching background image for each slide, chosen to be noticeable, but not dominate attention, and be well-suited color-wise for any text or images to be placed on top of the background. The presenter suggested that the background image didn't need to have anything to do with the content of the slide, and that it's mainly there for its general visual impact. The slides were not uniformly designed. It wasn't like someone had used a template where the title, text, images, etc. were all in the same or similar places on each slide. The most noticeable part of this was putting the title in different places. This variety was in itself engaging. The slides themselves were very light on text, and were mostly about presenting charts, graphs, tabular data, or images relevant to the talk. When there was text, the presenter never read the text verbatim (or sometimes even at all); the text there was a jumping-off point to discuss in detail whatever the topic of the slide was. The argument there was that people know how to read, can read in their heads faster than you can read to them out loud, and if you're just going to read slides to them, you don't need to present it and you should instead just email a document for your attendees to read, and skip the presentation entirely. Finally, the slide deck itself did not have all that many slides. The presenter dwelled on each slide a lot longer than I've seen in most presentations. The slides were more guideposts to mark the overall topics and outline of the presentation, to provide milestones and transitions. For the most part, the presentation could have been done without the slides at all; the slides were there to add visual flair, help keep attention, and (occasionally) prevent data or images that would be easier to understand visually rather than spoken. Ultimately I found the mock presentation given to be incredibly engaging, much more so than the vast majority of presentations I'd attended before or have attended since, and I remember that the topic wasn't even something that would usually hold my interest so tightly. I very rarely gave/give presentations, but I've tried to take all this to heart when I had the opportunity to do so. I don't think I ever really did the variety-of-background-images thing (honestly, I never enjoyed giving presentations, and treated it as a chore, and never felt motivated enough to find a bunch of suitable background images). But I at least always tried to keep text to a minimum, so the meat of my talk would be in what I was saying out loud. I wouldn't call myself a particularly good presenter or public speaker, but I think my talks were better than they otherwise would have been. > Slides have two distinct purposes: [...] as a way to learn or review material outside of the presentation I've come to think that slides aren't very good for this second purpose, and probably shouldn't be. The information density is never going to be high enough, and if it is, that's going to make for a terrible slide during the presentation. I would much rather read a transcript of the talk later, or, better, a detailed summary. If the slides have charts or other data, then sure, it's useful to have those outside of the talk, but those can also be inserted in-line into the transcript or summary. I get that it's more work to write up a transcript or summary (and I know I myself would probably balk at having to do this), but if you've prepared properly for the presentation, you probably already more or less have something approaching a transcript in your talk notes. Cleaning them up for publication isn't zero effort, of course, but it should be much less work than writing something from scratch.

aadhavans 2y ago

I think bullet points capture the worst of both worlds. You have text (which people focus on, rather than on the presenter), but you don't have enough that one could learn from them outside the presentation. There's a saying that bullet points are called so because they 'kill' a presentation, and I think there's some truth to that.

gnicholas 2y ago
I think short bullet points are great. That way the audience can take them in quickly (I highlight one at a time to prevent them from reading ahead/behind) without being distracted for more than a fraction of a second. It also helps people to see how many items are being discussed (e.g., "there are three reasons that language X is better than language Y"). For me at least, that makes it easier to remember the reasons, since it functions as a checksum.
stoperaticless 2y ago
Do you mean that full paragraph is better? Strong disagree if so.
- aadhavans 2y ago
  Perhaps not full paragraphs, but the phrase-style nature of bullet points has never really helped me understand the material. If there must be text, I would rather see complete sentences on a presentation. I've used the assertion-evidence framework[0] for presentations[1] before, where the idea is to have a complete sentence at the top of your slide, with images below that illustrate your point. [0] https://www.assertion-evidence.com/ https://www.assertion-evidence.com/ [1] While these presentations _were_ about engineering, they were more educational than technical in nature.