Method in the mayhem...
Mar. 18th, 2005 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpBack when I worked for Gene Wang at Borland, the company coughed up some extraordinary sum of cash - I heard $5K per person - to have Jerry Weissman come train Gene, me, and someone else (I can't definitively recall who, though I have my suspicions) in the art of public speaking. As coaches go, Weissman was, and continues to be, a heavy hitter.
I still remember one of his basic principles for constructing a PowerPoint slide:
Meaning: a "body" that contains no more than 4 lines, with no more than 4 words on a line. No word wrap allowed. (Notice how the summary of this principle would itself qualify as an excellent example of a line on a presentation slide!)
The idea is to give the audience (and you, the speaker) a set of tags with which to remember key points and gauge overall progress. In a way, it's like the way airlines flash those dandy little maps that show where you are along the route... every once in a while. It also keeps the audience from getting ahead of you, since there's not much to extract from the bare bones shown on the screen.
For some reason, technical people think it's okay to use PowerPoint as a kind of ersatz word processor, which kind of defeats the purpose of doing a presentation (after all, the audience can read the slides silently a lot faster than any speaker can do so out loud). And one of Weissman's points related exactly to that: If your slide conveys your entire message, what are you doing, flapping your gums up at the front of the room?
The item I am almost finished with right now basically consists of chunks of the original document that have been shoehorned onto individual slides. I can now see why the presentation differs from the original: the level of detail in the original document is so high, that even the presenter felt obliged to abridge the text, requiring some wordsmithing to remove the more serious scars.
More later. Time is of the essence.
Cheers...
I still remember one of his basic principles for constructing a PowerPoint slide:
4 x 4
Meaning: a "body" that contains no more than 4 lines, with no more than 4 words on a line. No word wrap allowed. (Notice how the summary of this principle would itself qualify as an excellent example of a line on a presentation slide!)
The idea is to give the audience (and you, the speaker) a set of tags with which to remember key points and gauge overall progress. In a way, it's like the way airlines flash those dandy little maps that show where you are along the route... every once in a while. It also keeps the audience from getting ahead of you, since there's not much to extract from the bare bones shown on the screen.
For some reason, technical people think it's okay to use PowerPoint as a kind of ersatz word processor, which kind of defeats the purpose of doing a presentation (after all, the audience can read the slides silently a lot faster than any speaker can do so out loud). And one of Weissman's points related exactly to that: If your slide conveys your entire message, what are you doing, flapping your gums up at the front of the room?
The item I am almost finished with right now basically consists of chunks of the original document that have been shoehorned onto individual slides. I can now see why the presentation differs from the original: the level of detail in the original document is so high, that even the presenter felt obliged to abridge the text, requiring some wordsmithing to remove the more serious scars.
More later. Time is of the essence.
Cheers...
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-18 10:48 pm (UTC)I've committed myself to a two to four month job helping a new test branch under a new testing contract conform to the NASA-JSC center-wide configuration control and documentation requirement and I probably will have to do some presentations related to that.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-18 11:02 pm (UTC)In my experience translating such slides and interpreting at the meetings at which they are presented, NASA (and Russian counterparts) have a very strong tendency to pretty much create presentations that honestly and truly need no presenter. In fact, I remember one presentation in which translators had to add slides because translated text (which tends to expand 15-25% in size when it goes into another language) would not fit on the slides already in the presentation (the originator had already selected the minimum font size and left virtually no white space for any purpose).
Good luck with the configuration control!
Cheers...