150 slide:ology
Guns don’t kill people, as the saying goes, but bullets
kill plenty. Many an audience has fallen prey to bullet
slide after bullet slide, and a dead audience (even
metaphorically speaking) won’t help you achieve
your presentation objectives!
Obeying Gun Laws and Bullet Laws
Protect your audience from the dangers
of bullets with a few simple guidelines.
First, if you have to use bullets at all, use
them sparingly.
Many rules have been written about how many bullets
should be on a slide. But, ignore the 4 x 4 rule, and the
5 x 5 rule, and the 7-word per slide rule. Instead, use good
design sense to visually compose your bullet slides.
T!P
Keep a copy of the Chicago
Manual of Style and Words into
Type and refer to them often.
This bullet slide
boiled down the
contents from this
spread into a brief,
parallel structure.
Jerry Weissman, author of The Power Presenter, strongly
believes that when you create a text slide containing
bullets, you are, in effect, presenting headlines only. As
the presenter, it’s your job to put flesh on the bones of
the skeletal bullets. The presenter provides the body text
around the headline. When composing your bullets, think
of them as newspaper headlines. Keep them as succinct
as possible and write each line in parallel structure. That
means that each one must begin with the same tense and
the same part of speech: verb, noun, adjective, and so on.
Whether your first bullet is a sentence or just a fragment,
make the rest of them the same. And finally, avoid the
extra visual complexity of sub-bullets whenever you can.
Standard convention traditionally uses title case for
titles and initial caps (capitalizing only the first word
of the line) for everything else. You can’t go wrong
with this convention. But some companies have other
conventions that are dictated by their brand guidelines.
Use all caps sparingly and only for emphasis because,
as with e-mail, caps can be perceived as shouting.
Whatever you choose, do it consistently. It’s bothersome
if some bullets have a period and others don’t. Likewise,
slides that use title case followed by slides employing
initial caps are disconcerting. Bullet points, too, should
either all be initial cap or use another convention.
Remember, consistency is key.
Bullet Laws
• Protect audience
• Use sparingly
• Write headlines
• Use parallel structure
• Avoid sub-bullets
Using Visual Elements: Background, Color, and Text 151
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