5 Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations

The Web is awash with guides for creating PowerPoint presentations, most of which would make awful PowerPoint presentations. Having just finished editing a 125-slide presentation, I have few suggestions that you might not find elsewhere.

1. Never build a 125-slide presentation. Audiences have a limited attention span. Any presentation that takes longer than 15-20 minutes is a losing proposition. The biggest benefit of a short show is that you can open floor for questions, which allows your audience to tell you what they really want to know.

Acronym Snafus

Less is not always more. That’s especially true with acronyms. These shorthand expressions save typing time -- its so much quicker to tap out CDC instead of  “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”  But when writers use acronyms without thinking, the results can be hard to read and, sometimes, impossible to understand. Here are three rules for the effective use of acronyms.

1. Regardless of your audience, stick to acronyms that are widely used by the general public. No one would be confused by NASA, DNA, DVD or BYOB.

Beware false ranges

“The new BMW 500 arrives loaded with cutting edge technology, everything from in-dash GPS to electronic stability control.”

Did you spot the problem with this sentence? It suffers from a common communication fault called a false range. These sentences usually take the form of “everything from ‘A’ to ‘B’.” The problem arises when the reader has no way of knowing what comes between A and B.

In our example, the reader can guess which technologies are in the new BMW, but it’s unlikely that the car really has every automotive technology available.