In earlier editions of Be Creative, we walked you through The Common Illusions of Colors , How to choose colors?, Ideas Are Everywhere , Simplicity Makes Difference , Transparency Works Well, and in today’s edition we will be working on Text.
Text is one of the most important part of the slide but if you don’t know how to use it, it can also be the dangerous element. Too much text on the slide can blow up your audiences brain and too little text can put your audience in a confusion. So lets learn how to use text in a presentation starting with How Much Text To Use?
If you are regular visitor of our site you may have seen our video lecture of Carmine Gallow who suggested to keep statements close to twitter headline which is 140 characters limit. Yes! this is a most effective way of expressing ideas — just simplify the entire paragraph into a very short and understandable version. This really works well — when you keep that short passage on the slide and explain it in your words in a very detailed way, definitely you can attain most of your audiences attention.
Alternatively you can use the text of someone from history and match up with your context. If you observe the videos of TED talks, you will find presenters use quotes of famous personalities of history and they detail those words sayings by implying with their own ideas and it’s a pretty way to express your ideas. You audience are here to hear you and they want to hear new things and your job is take them through that journey where they can find words from history making a new history in present.
So as we conclude this article we would suggest that — Text is something that needs to lay low — not too much low — neither too much high. Just keep it short, short enough to make sense and keen enough to make your audience understand. And rest of the magic work is you. Words and Art does only 30% of the presentation job, the rest is all depended on the presenter.
Hope you liked the article, we will inputting more information on Using Text and Styling it in PowerPoint in our upcoming articles.
