32. “I Can Read It Myself!”: Three Simple Steps to Avoid Reading Slides Verbatim

During the past 20 years, I have posed the same question to every one of the thousands of participants who have taken the Power Presentations program:

“How do you feel about presenters who read the words on their slides verbatim?”

I have also posed the same question to the countless businessmen and -women who have sat in the audiences of other people’s presentations. Not a single one of them has said that he or she likes the practice. Their responses, usually accompanied by facial expressions ranging from disdain to anger, usually take one of these variations:

“Why don’t you just email it to me?”

“Why bother?”

“I might as well do my email!”

“I’m not a child!”

And the most common response: “I can read it myself!”

The last reaction brings up a note of perspective: The first time anyone ever read to you was to put you to sleep, and thus you—and every man and woman in every audience you will ever face—are forever programmed.

The pervasive practice of reading slides verbatim has drawn derision in many quarters, including that of comedian Don McMillan’s YouTube video “How NOT to Use PowerPoint” (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB7S-KOJIfE).^F32.1 But reading slides verbatim also raises a follow-up question: “If everyone finds the practice abhorrent, just who does it?” Is there a group of evil phantom presenters giving presentations a bad name?

The fact is, all presenters fall victim to this practice at one time or another and are just too embarrassed to admit it. They fall victim because of three even more pervasive practices:

• Use of the presentation as a document

• Lack of preparation and practice

• Text-heavy design

You read several solutions to counter each of these practices in earlier chapters—the most valuable of which is to minimize the verbiage on your slides and to maximize the use of pictorial images—but two additional solutions can help you avoid the dreaded reading verbatim trap:

1. If you do use bullets, treat them as headlines not sentences, and limit them to four or five words per line. Construct each line to begin with the same part of speech, preferably action verbs. This approach will make it virtually impossible for you to read verbatim.
2. When you present each bullet, paraphrase, use synonyms, or juxtapose the order of the words as you speak them. The audience will be able to extrapolate the meaning of the bullet without having to think, “I can read it myself!”