This is not intended to be a comprehensive or complete guide to how to build a slide deck. It's really intended to provide some food for thought, some examples of what we've been talking about in class as you work on creating the slide deck that will be your final presentation, your final assignment for English 203. First thing I'll say about this first slide is that I am claiming fair use to use Dilbert. If I were speaking, let's say, in front of a thousand people at a conference for which I was being paid, I would not use this without permission. However, since this is for a college course, academic purposes, I believe I'm okay in using this, and it's funny. And so, It helps make my point.
However, as I said, if I were making a living as a professional speaker and I were speaking in front of an audience where I was being paid, I wouldn't use this. So what I want to do here is just give you some basic examples of how to go about creating a slide deck that achieves its purpose. and avoids death by PowerPoint. I provide this image here to show an excellent example of what a slide is for.
So here you have, and it's so obvious that it's kind of feels a little simplistic, I get that. But here we have a person giving a presentation and then she's using some data. It has been converted into a graph. That's a perfectly useful way to combine images with words.
In your progress report, part of the assignment was to include at least three charts or graphs, just to get you the practice and experience of communicating in that way and using an image supplemented by words or said another way using an image to supplement your text to convey information as efficiently and effectively as possible this is what a slide deck is for think about things that you can't convey effectively with just words and it could be a simple idea concept even a sense of something and that's why sometimes you can use an image that of of people or things happening or something that evokes a certain emotion even to help supplement the words you're saying the slides are not your presentation you preparing a report that is going once again to be mostly words you're going to deliver it or you're going to presumably deliver it you can prepare it as if you're going to deliver it as an oral presentation an oral report supplemented with 10 to 15 slides that will assist you in conveying the information but they are not the presentation and this is lost on so many people all the time you as you are listening to this know exactly what i'm talking about and i think you will start to get the feel for what to do to avoid that here's a slide the part above the blue stripe that I use in one of my other classes and I provide this to you to reinforce a point and then to explain why sometimes I break this approach. So obviously again here is a slide that if you look at it and there's nothing else to explain it it kind of means nothing. but it's clean it's simple and it serves its purpose which is to simply supplement give the eye something to look at while there is audio to listen to in a class presentation in a class lesson that i've prepared when you are tempted to throw a lot of stuff at a slide or if you're tempted to complex or strange looking design I encourage you to swat that away there are a lot of interesting designs available to you out there I would choose something simple there are times when there are exceptions in other words There are times when the five-word rule or the seven-element rule or whatever kind of rule that we're talking about here when it comes to Death by PowerPoint may not be appropriate.
There are times in PowerPoint presentations that I put together that I use a lot more than six or seven different elements. but there's a reason behind it there is a purpose behind it and there is a an audience that is appropriate for it usually it's when i'm providing a lesson for one of my classes and the students are my audience and they have to do some extra lifting some heavy lifting because it's it's a college course and so i will go into a lot of detail on something both in the slide and in the audio content that i'm using to supplement it because the expectation is they're going to to pay attention they're going to dive into that and i'm providing a lot of explicit information but generally speaking And for this assignment, I would encourage you to keep it clean. I'm not talking about the language. I'm talking clearly about keeping it uncluttered.
Keep it clean. Keep it simple. Emphasize the narrative that you're going to be adding to it. This is, after all, an English...
course a business writing course and so the emphasis here is on the words that you're using the reason why we're doing an assignment using slide decks is they're so often badly done and we're going to focus on how to strip it down to its basic elements and really focus on the spoken Content. You may not choose to record your assignment, but you're going to provide a script for it. And that's where the the meat of this assignment is. OK, so after everything that I've just said, I'm going to show where I have broken the rule and why. So this is a slide.
The top part of this slide you're looking at represents a slide that I use in a lesson for this class. And it has way more words than I've been telling you you should be using. And here's why.
I, for this purpose, am providing you the equivalent of what would have been delivered as a lecture or a presentation in a face-to-face class since we're not face-to-face it's important that i can deliver to you very specific information when i'm providing assistance on an assignment and so here i include a bunch a whole bunch of words right and i go through it the the audio for this goes through this step by step and then explains further now why do i do this because you have access to this anytime you want it you can freeze frame the audio and stop it right there and if you want write the words down or print them out if you're attending a conference or a powerpoint presentation via zoom you have no control like that you are at the mercy of the presenter and you need to assume that when you are delivering your presentation you are in charge of it and that your audience also doesn't have the option of stopping a slide printing it out writing all the words down now one of the things that goes hand in hand with making a good presentation whether it's in a report that's totally that's fully written or it's a report like this where you're including these visual elements is to make sure that your audience, your live audience, if there is one, and for this one we're presuming there would be, understands that they can ask you to stop anytime and ask questions. That's an important piece of a good oral presentation. It's not about just ramming stuff through and getting it done.
There is an element of interactivity here that is unique to live or face-to-face report making. But back to my main point, yes, there are times. And if you can explain to me, if you, let's say you create a slide that has lots of words in it for your final report, your progress report done as a slide deck. If you can explain to me in your notes why you felt that was essential, then that's what i'm looking for that you have thought it through and in this case i really felt like i needed to provide additional information that for lack of a better explanation breaks the rules of death by powerpoint everything here is a guideline everything here that i'm talking about are our best practices but you need to be adaptable to your own report and your own audience and what the needs of that particular audience are going to be keep your slides consistent use a consistent design model so even though here the blue stripe that has my the topic for this slide now moves to the top it's still the same basic design so what I often see in presentations even by experienced high paid speakers is they their presentations vary in design from one to another there one slide is is one and you go to the next slide and it's something entirely different.
And I think sometimes they think, well, that's going to keep people interested. No, it's going to keep people confused. What keeps people interested is the content, the words you're saying, not the crazy designs that you're throwing at them. So my last tip for this presentation.
As you're thinking about how to build your slide deck presentation, your slide deck assignment, is to have an arc. Tell a story, a beginning, a middle, and an end. So again, this is on the top here.
This is a copy of a slide that I have used, that I continue to use for one of my other classes. And clearly, by itself, it means nothing. It's there simply to supplement the things that I'm saying in the recorded lesson. So that's the key here.
Think about a strong opening, a solid story, a solid content in the middle, and then a good, strong and clear finish so that when you're done everybody knows you're done you don't have to say okay now i'm done it's obvious so that's just a simple overview of some helpful approaches to building your slide deck for this final assignment