Effective Presenting with PowerPoint

I don't frequently give presentations, but when I've got one on the horizon, I think back on all the boring presentations I've had to sit through. I'm sure those presenters spent a long time adding all those slides, bullet points, animations, and sounds, but I'm pretty sure they didn't spend any time thinking about what would actually be the most effective way to present.

So, I constantly try to learn about effective ways to use PowerPoint-style slides. In the interest of saving presentation audiences from hours of boredom, here are my two favorite methods so far:

10/20/30 Rule

Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist, has heard hundreds of lousy pitches from people who want to spend his money. As a response, he developed The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint:

"a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points..." (emphasis mine)

It turns out that reducing the amount of information in your slides is nearly universal advice. Your slides should be talking points (and maybe visual aids). If all you do is read from your slides, you are wasting your audience's time -- you would do better to hand out copies of your slides and let your audience read on their own time. However, you should not reduce the amount of information in your slides just to force people to listen to you.

Lessig Method

Lawrence Lessig, a renowned academic specializing in law (and pictured above), faces the challenge of explaining complex legal situations to a wide range of audiences. He has developed a presentation style (now known as the "Lessig Method") which is very visual and fast-paced but requires more preparation and practice.

• Example 1 - Lessig's presentation at TED (described as "standing-ovation" good). Video that cuts back and forth between slides and Lessig himself at the lecturn.
• Example 2 - Lessig's announcement video for Change Congress. Video that shows slides with recorded audio from Lessig.

The Lessig Method is difficult to describe. Lessig seems to take a truly excellent speech and add hundreds of slides that each accompany or illustrate a key point or idea. This is a sentence from a Lessig's talk at TED: "[slide with sepia-tone photo of man in uniform] In 1906 this man, John Phillip Sousa, traveled to [slide with photo of US Capital building] this place, the United States Capital to [slide with photo of small brass-colored machine] talk about this technology, what he called the quote 'talking machine'." The slides sometimes feature pictures, but often they feature a single word or phrase in large letters. Later slides often cross out or add words to help show the relationship between "old ways" and "new ways" of approaching the topic.

Conclusion

Although the 10/20/30 Rule and Lessig Method are opposing styles, they both are effective because they take into account the main idea of presenting:

As a presenter, your audience expects you to take a large amount of information and give them the key points that they need to know.

With this in mind, here is how I recommend approaching a presentation:

1. Know your topic inside out. Read relevant blog posts (and blog archives). Read articles on websites about the topic. Find one or two key books that the blogs recommend and at least skim them. Ask your friends what parts of the topic are relevant to their lives and their work.
2. Identify the most important key points for your audience. - This is truly an art. If you get this right, you'll know it, and everything else will fall into place.
3. Choose a presentation style that suits you and the circumstances of the presentation. Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule is a good guideline for nearly all situations. The Lessig Method is very impressive when done well, but requires much more preparation than most presentations ever need. Of course, there are other methods out there, but these seem to be two of the most popular and successful.
4. Develop your presentation & slides, trying hard not to add any more information than you need to.
5. Practice your presentation. Don't be afraid to change it! If something doesn't feel right, you should change it until it clicks.
6. Present!