Why Are Presentations So Boring?

While I might refer to Microsoft PowerPoint within this article, I am speaking in general about presentations. PowerPoint being a bit more popular, I decided to make reference to it. This is however not an endorsement of PowerPoint.

I have found that over the last couple weeks, I have had to sit through a few presentations on various topics and varying lengths, all with the same results, boring. The information presented was good and the presenters for the most part tried their best, but it would appear that half the audience, tunes out after 20 minutes and the other half would get up every now and then. Worst with the profileration of cellular phones, people immediately whip them out once they begin to get bored.

Now, I know how difficult it can be for a presenter (I have had my share of it) to try and keep the audience entertained while trying to get your information across in an interesting way. So I decided that I would look at the problem from the viewpoint of the individual that has to listen to the presentation, and then note all the things that I see the presenter doing that makes me bored, and then write what it is that would fix that, so here goes.

Reading Your Slides Word For Word

Without realising it, some presenters will have up their slides on screen and then read, word for word, everything that’s on the slide. This is annoying in many ways, one, the audience can also read and if you’re going to be reading only what you have on the slide, then you should just give us all copies of the presentation when we come through the door and tell us that’s it. Two, as the presenter, you’re going to be spending most of your time with your back to the audience and therefore you won’t be able to gauge their reaction to your presentation and the information you’re trying to get across. Eye contact plays a fundamental part in holding an audience’s attention.

Also remember that the more slides you have and the more information there is on each slide, the more distracting it will it be for the audience; whereas the fewer and simpler the slides are, the easier it will be to keep them listening.

Reading and Listening Is Distracting

If you have nothing but text on your presentation screen, people will try to read and listen at the same time (especially if they realise that you’re reading word for word), and they will end up not doing either very well. Some people may read ahead of you, thereby completely missing the explanation that you would be giving or the analogy that would segway nicely into the next point or slide.

Yet another issue that affects the very wordy presentation slide is if the print is too small to read, your audience will become irritated at being expected to see what it is that you are presenting. What makes it even worst is when the presenter says “you probably won’t be able to read this, but”. This says to me that you knew from before that the information on the slide would be difficult to read, but didn’t think it important enough to make the changes required to benefit the audience. Not cool.

Prepare Your Speech As Well

As a presenter, you spend a lot of time and effort preparing your presentation slides to make sure they have the information that you believe the audience needs and that it flows logically. What needs to be done also, is preparation of your actual speech/dialogue that goes with the presentation.

Projecting slide after slide might be visually appealing, but if you haven’t planned exactly what you’re going to say, you’ll have to make it up as you go, and you might end up rambling on and on, you may even end up discussing some issue that should have been discussed 5 slides later. This is yet another way to loose your audience.

To avoid this rambling requires careful planning. Consider what it is that you wish to say and in what order. Do this before thinking about slides and you won’t need as many slides or have slides cluttered with words. When you work on your speech/dialogue first, then your slides will serve to help to clarify things for the audience, rather than just being a reminder to you of what to say next.

Information Overload

This presents the biggest problem with slide-based presentations, which is that presenters think that they can get far more information across than is actually possible in a presentation. At the core of this misconception is a failure to appreciate that speaking and listening are fundamentally different from writing and reading.

In fact, writing is arguably the most important “invention” in the history of information technology. Before writing, the amount of information that could be passed on to others was severely limited by what could be communicated by word of mouth. But the ability to write meant that vast amounts of knowledge could be communicated at previously unimagined levels of detail.

But with PowerPoint presentations, its very easy to put written and numerical information on slides, that it leads presenters into the mistaken belief that all the required details will be successfully transmitted to the audience.

More Bullet Points Than You Can Remember

I have heard it said that bullet points make information easier to absorb. I’m not too sure about that. Let’s say you have a presentation that has 10 slides, with each slide having 5 bullet points on each, this would mean that you’re expecting your audience to remember a list of 50 points. I know I couldn’t remember them all. How about you?

A Microsoft executive recently said that one of the best PowerPoint presentations he’d ever heard had no slides with bullet points.

Hearing that comment from a Mircorsoft executive is surprising, as so many of PowerPoint’s standard templates invite users to create slides that have lists of bullet points. I would think that they would encourage you to create slides with images as this is clearly a benefit to the audience. If more presenters took advantage of creating presentations with images, then inspiring and entertaining PowerPoint presentations might become the norm, rather than the exception.

Whew, I didn’t know I had this much to say about presentations. Well I hope that I have in some way influenced all the potential presenters out there into rethink their presentation strategy, in the hopes of having more entertaining and engaging presentations in the future.

All the best.