Spanish for Professional Purposes...

...for teachers and students who see the need for Spanish language and Hispanic cultures knowledge in professional contexts.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

PowerPoint Presentations

As the semester comes to a close at colleges and universities everywhere, it's presentation time! If you're preparing a final presentation using PowerPoint, remember the golden rule:

Don't write everything you want to say on the slides and then read them out loud to your audience. Everyone in your audience can surely read and would rather just take a handout and go home to read the presentation.

The heart of the presentation should be about what you have to say. The PowerPoint slides should:

  • frame your topic with a declarative statement instead of a dry title. Instead of "The industry:", try to really assert something: "The industry model is too old to be sustainable in the 21st century"
  •  instead of a bulleted list of text on the rest of the slide, provide compelling visual support for what you are saying (a photograph, a colorful chart, dramatic statistics, a pithy quote).


Remember: it's you giving the presentation and PowerPoint backing you up--not the other way around.

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