Power Point Rules: Forget “2min/slide”

15 October 2006 | Media, Power Point, Public Speaking | Comments

For years I’ve wondered where the nonsense about spending two minutes per slide during a Powerpoint presentation came from. Finally, I turned to the web.

If you run a Google search on the phrase “two minutes per slide” you’ll quickly find yourself on a circa 1997 web page called “Oral Presentation Advice” by Professor Mark D. Hill of the Computer Science Department University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Here’s one relevant sentence: “This conference talk outline is a starting point, not a rigid template. Most good speakers average two minutes per slide (not counting title and outline slides), and thus use about a dozen slides for a twenty minute presentation.”

Somehow this advice — which may very well work for computer science presentations, although I doubt it — has managed to sneak its way out of comp-sci and into presentations that people are giving at conferences and in classrooms all over the world. This is sad news because two minutes per slide is at least 90 seconds too long if you’re trying to hold an audience’s attention in a dark room, particularly after lunch. However, if you’re trying to help people fall asleep, then this rule is effective.

I give a lot of talks and I’m trying to work out my own Powerpoint rules, so as I think about them I’ll share them here. Like a bludgeon, Powerpoint is a blunt but effective tool if you know how to use it.

Here are my first thoughts:

• If you put the same slide up on the screen for two minutes, then the people in your audience will stop listening to anything you have to say for as long as it takes them to read the slide. You’ll never get them back into the same rhythm again.
• Two minutes of data probably requires eight slides at minimum.
• You need to parsimoniously hand out a new slide with each new bit of data. That let’s you control the pace and rhythm of the talk.
• Don’t use any of the animations that Powerpoint makes so easy. If you’re an animated speaker, then you don’t need them. If you aren’t, they won’t help you. At all. Powerpoint animations are the public speaking equivalent of thinking that a weird font and unusual color will make your writing better.
• Don’t read your slides. The slides are a prop, an illustration, something that you, the speaker, are in dialogue with. If you simply read the slides, then why does your audience need you? Most of them probably know how to read already.

P.S. If you don’t believe me about this — and if you’d like to read a devastating critique of Powerpoint when it comes to depthfully dealing with data — check out Edward Tufte’s classic essay, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.” It’s worth the $7.00.