A live-stream segment by TJ Walker advising presenters to respect audience reading habits. He argues that audiences prefer to read silently at close range and criticizes putting text-heavy slides onscreen while speaking or reading slides aloud. He recommends either not displaying text, providing handouts/read-before-or-after, or pausing silently to allow reading before speaking.
Chapters
One of the big problems with so many PowerPoint presentations is the presenter simply is not showing respect for the audience, the customs of the audience, the culture of the audience. By that, I don't mean how to say hello or bowing properly, although those could be important, too. What I mean is how the speaker asks the audience to read. Most people in most cultures, everywhere, whether it's business, government, the nonprofit sector, have devised a system of reading that's worked pretty well for them their whole life. It's called holding a book, a newspaper, a tablet, a computer screen about 14 inches in front of them, reading silently, and trying to be someplace where no one's talking to them. Now, there might be noise on a airplane or a bus and people talking, but they're not talking to you. So you can actually focus on one thing, reading. That is how people like to read. That's how most people read their whole life. That's how they read, especially when it's something important. So what do most PowerPoint presenters ask their audience to do? They're asking them to read something that isn't 14 inches away, but is now 20, 30, 40, 50ft away on a big screen. And the speaker is talking the whole time and then turning the pages. So I ask you, when you have something important for your business or your life that you want to read, do you ask family and friends to come into the room, start talking to you the whole time, and turning the pages of the book you're trying to read? I didn't think so. That you probably would be annoyed at a family member or a friend or colleague who did that. And yet, isn't that exactly what you do to your audiences with PowerPoint presentations? So here's my advice. And if you've been a regular listener of this, you certainly are not going to be surprised at my advice of don't put text up on a PowerPoint screen for people to read. But if you do put up text on a PowerPoint slide for someone to read, I need you to literally shut your mouth, close your mouth and give people an opportunity to read. Don't put up six bullet points. Pause for three seconds and then keep going. Because then people can't read. They got to decide, do they ignore your text or do they ignore what you're saying? Also, don't read to them unless your audience is full of three year olds and they can't read. Most people hate it when someone else reads to them. When the text is there, they're thinking, I know how to read. This person assumes I don't know how to read. This is insulting. So. So don't read to your audience. You never want to read text from a bullet from a PowerPoint slide. I, of course, recommend that you don't put any text up on a slide for your audience to read. Ask them to read in advance. Ask them to read afterwards. Give them a handout. But if you do put up text, close your mouth and read it silently to yourself, very slowly, so that everyone in the audience has a chance to read it, then, and only then, get rid of the slide and start talking again. It's the same with a handout. Now, I use handouts extensively in my workshops. They tend to have no more than 10 points on them with just a couple of words describing it. But even then, after I've handed it out to people, I close my mouth. I don't summarize what's on the sheet. I don't talk about it. I don't say the same thing. I don't cover it quickly. I just shut my mouth and I wait until people's heads have come up, they've stopped reading, and they're now looking at me again. Then, and only then, do I talk. So please respect your audience's traditions and customs for how they like to read. You can tell me. Well, TJ, in our culture, we have three bullet points and 10 words per bullet point. And that's our culture. I understand that's how people may have created slides in your company, but you don't really have evidence that that's how people like to read. Respect your audience and how they like to read.
