Penelope Carpentier
Historians by and large don’t get trained in how to do slide presentations. Primarily we learn by observing our elders in scholarship, those who have been around for longer and presented at more conferences. Surely, we think, they know what they’re doing. But they’ve been working on the same premise as we are: they also looked to their predecessors’ efforts as exemplars. But what we are all drawing on are the very first slides, which were created by scholars who weren’t used to presentations even with overhead projectors, let alone the new technology of Microsoft PowerPoint. They bodged together something that would simply do, and then passed that bodginess down to us today. We can do better!
(Albert Bettannier, La tache noire, 1887; public domain)
Younger scholars learn their presentation skills from their academic predecessors
In order to forge our way to better presentations overall, let’s go through the process you might use to produce PowerPoint slides, and at each stage we’ll look at some pitfalls we might fall into, and some tips that we can use to make our slides actually useful to our talk, rather than distracting from it.
The Pondering Stage
Do you need one?
So you’ve just put the finishing touch on your conference paper. Great work! Now it’s time to do the slides to go with it. But do you need them? You don’t actually have to have a PowerPoint presentation. People these days expect it; we’re a lot more frequently bombarded by visual media and aren’t used to just sitting and listening to something by itself. But presenting without slides still a valid option. If you do decide to include slides, your paper should still be able to be presented without visual aids at all. Technical problems do happen, and if they happen to you, it shouldn’t be the end of the world. Your presentation shouldn’t fall apart because you couldn’t show a graph, and that’s all people remember from it. Your visual aids are just that: an aid.
Things to Remember
(Woman with a wax tablet and stylus, fresco from Pompeii; public domain)
Be thoughtful when creating your slides, whether using a computer or a tablet
Firstly, PowerPoint slides are like the illustrations in a children’s book. They either describe what’s going on, or provide a visual example of what you’re saying, or stop it from being boring. As David Phillips says in his TED talk “Death by PowerPoint”, 1 the words that are coming out of your mouth and you yourself are the stars of the show. You want people to be focussing on you and what you’re saying, not the slides. They’re just the support act or the background dancers to make you up the front look good.
Secondly, as you do with your presentation text, be mindful of your audience. Are they all going to be specialists? What age bracket are they likely to be in? Is anyone going to have English, or whatever language you’re presenting in, as a second language? If they’re all specialists, you can assume more: you can put a picture up that is familiar to your field and expect everyone to know what it’s about, or you can make a field-specific joke and most people will probably get it. If they’re likely to be older, visuals in small detail should be avoided. If your presentation language is not the attendees’ first language, then you’ll want to simplify your expressions and limit your jargon. The aim is to make your presentation and your information – words and visuals – accessible to as many people as possible.
Thirdly, remember that PowerPoint is just a tool. You don’t have to prescribe to its templates. This is particularly true of the headings box. As David Phillips points out, the massive text of the headings box is a great way to draw everyone’s attention to that heading, but then, rather than looking at anything else on the slide, their attention stays on that heading. They are entirely optional; PowerPoint just sticks them in automatically. The same goes for dot points: PowerPoint adds them as a default, but you don’t have to play that game if you don’t want to.
Backgrounds
Plain black text on a white background can be pretty boring for an audience member to look at, and changing your background to something different brings some more interest into your slides. Some people use their university’s licensed background. You might like to go for one of the templates that Microsoft suggests. Both these are fine.
Slide 1
Slide 2
Another option is a picture background to generate some more interest. Remember to go for something that is simple – not with a bunch of detail that might distract people trying to figure it out – but also something evocative of the subject matter of your talk. For example, for a talk on remembrance, you could use a picture of rosemary, its symbol in the language of flowers (right).
But, as David Phillips suggests, it’s best to avoid using a white or brightly coloured background (Slide 1). If you do, people are going to be mesmerised by the shiny screen. It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who’s watching TV or playing on their phone; they’re just not going to be listening to you. Remember, you’re the star of the show; you don’t want to be competing with your own slides. It’s better in general go for something darker and/or bland for your background (Slide 2).
Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis (by Mokkie; CC-BY-SA-3.0)
Content
One of the biggest temptations for historians is the wall of text. Unless we’re doing something with more visual elements, such as archaeology (with its interesting pictures of artifacts) or art history (with its interesting pictures of pictures), we might feel that all we have left to us is the wall of text, whether it’s a chunk of text from a source we’re investigating, or a quote from another scholar, or even a dot point summary of what we’re literally saying at that moment.
One of the most common missteps is when we put up our wall of text (for example, Slide 3) and just go on with our talk over the top of it. We might go to the text eventually, we might even just refer to it tangentially, we may just whack it up and hope that people will read it on their own.
Slide 3
The problem here is that people can’t focus on two things at the same time. If you give them text and talk, then they’ll read the text, then remember they should be listening to you and switch back to listening, but then they’ll be back to reading the text, and so on. They’ll remember neither what you said nor what was on the screen. Remember, you shouldn’t be competing with your own presentation. You are the star here.
This brings us to Tip 1 on content: Don’t put any text on the screen that you’re not immediately going to read out. As soon as you hit the “next slide” button, you read out exactly what you’ve put up. People are going to be reading it anyway, and if it’s smoothly in as part of your talk, there’s no distraction, and people are still with you. That means if you have something in multiple languages, be prepared to read out both languages. If there isn’t a point to you having the original language up there other than to say “look, this was originally in Greek” or whatever, then just put up the translation. You don’t need to show your Greek underpants; we trust you’ve done the work. You only have limited time, after all.
(Irish monk writing; public domain)
Writing with two pens shows just how angry he is.
Tip 3 is in fact the most important tip, so I’ll put it in all caps: ONLY ONE IDEA PER SLIDE. This is something that David Phillips similarly underlined. As I said before, people can only focus on one thing at a time, so we need to keep it simple for them. One of the biggest culprits in wall of text is this: “In my presentation I’m going to discuss these things,” and then a wall of dot points (see Slide 4). By the time we’ve finished discussing point 1, the audience is already further along and not listening.
Instead, what we can do is gradually reveal our points, and as a new point is revealed, the previous ones are in a darker colour (see Slide 5). People’s attention will be drawn to the lighter colour and the new point, where you want their attention to be.2 We can even go back and recap, putting the appropriate point we’re explaining in the lighter colour (see Slide 6). This means that, wherever we go, the audience knows where their focus should be.
Tip 2 can also help us avoid the wall of text: Visualise your point rather than writing it out. Say you’re talking about the Church’s reaction to heretics: rather than spelling out on your slide, “I am now talking about the Church’s reaction to heretics,” show us a picture of a monk writing something, or even a modern-day person writing an angry letter. Show a picture of the person you’re talking about, or an artifact from the community that they were a part of, or what the location looks like today, as long as it relates to what you’re saying. If you need to, you can talk for ages over the exact same picture, or you can even do the whole talk over one picture. Your words are the star.
Slide 4
Slide 5
Slide 6
Slide 7
Slide 8
Using this text colour trick is also great for tables. Tables full of data coming at you all at once is at the same time both overwhelming and intensely boring (see Slide 7). But it becomes so much more manageable if you draw people’s attention to a discrete chunk at a time (see Slide 8). Now it becomes part of a developing story rather than a slab of meaningless data.
Won’t this mean a lot of slides? Maybe, but it’s not an efficiency race. Just make sure that people have enough time to digest what’s on the slide before moving to the next one. But if you have just one idea per slide, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Visuals
Pictures
As mentioned above, pictures in your presentation are like illustrations in a children’s book. They should be relevant to the point you’re making, ideally on a direct level – like you’re talking about a particular author, and you show a picture of that author – or at least on a macro level, where it portrays the topic you’re talking about in general. In addition to this principle, though, there are a few extra elements to make them helpful illustrations.
Most important when you go about choosing pictures is Tip 1: Be law-abiding. Avoid just grabbing any picture off the internet, but make sure you have the appropriate permissions to use it. Many places, like museums or creative commons, will let you freely use their images under certain circumstances; just be sure that they allow them for conferences. Just to be on the safe side, it’s useful to put the licence code (or whatever is appropriate) under the picture in a very light, small, non-distracting font.
We all love creative commons (public domain)
(Yassine Elshayeb in Thailand; CC-BY-SA-4.0)
The audience and the speaker can’t always be this close to the slides.
Tip 2 here is also fairly obvious: Pictures should be visible. On the one hand, they should be large enough to see clearly, which often happens when we try to put too many images on one slide. David Phillips here suggests six or fewer items on a page so that people can take everything in at a glance. On the other hand, it also means pictures should be a good enough resolution: looking at a pixellated mess is neither fun nor instructive.
Tip 3: Show the audience what they should be looking at. As with lists or tables, we should draw their focus to where we want rather than have their attention wandering all over the image in search of why it’s there. If you have a map or an artifact, or any other detailed picture, then have something that points out where you’d like to take them, whether that’s an arrow, a star, or a box or circle around it.
Tip 4: Keep your captions short. Again, the rule of six or less helps here: keep it to six or less words if you can, so people can just take in the whole caption at a glance and not get distracted by it by reading it. Unless it’s actually a point you’re making, the audience doesn’t need to know absolutely everything about the image.
Fonts
Choice of fonts is up to you as the presenter, although visibility must also be kept in mind here. Make sure it’s large enough to read from a distance, as some people may be seated far from the screen (around sizes 28-32, smaller for picture labels), and that it’s a colour that is legible across the whole of your background. One way to make your text really pop, and mitigate any conflict with the background, is to colour the box around your text, with a 30% transparency (see: before (Slide 9) and after (Slide 10) using this method). It will give you the contrast you need while being more subtle than a block of colour.
Slide 9
Slide 10
Transitions and Animations
Some people can get very excited with transitions and animations. They want their presentation to be more interesting, so they put in every fancy movement they can. Unfortunately, transitions and animations can be more distracting than interesting: the audience is thinking more about the origami fold transition than what was on the slide. So the tip here is to keep it simple: Fade or Push, perhaps even Wipe, for transitions, and a quick Disappear/Reappear or Fade for animations. There are some cool but subtle effects that you can do with Push and Morph (check out tutorials on YouTube), but we have to remember that we’re the show, not the slides.
A Quick Technical Warning
If you’re using someone else’s computer or system, bear in mind that they may not have the same version of PowerPoint that you do; they may not even have PowerPoint, and they’re importing your slides into another program. In this case your fancy animations or even your fancy fonts may not be available. In cases where you’re handing the reins to someone else, it’s best to keep your fonts basic, and avoid animations.
Similarly, if you’re not using your own computer, or you don’t know what the screen will look like at the time of your presentation, it’s a good idea to leave a margin of nothing around the edges of your slides in case they get cropped out.
Be aware too that some screens in auditorium will be floor-length, and people may not be able to read the bottom third of your screen because of the heads in front of them. So unless you know otherwise, like you’re doing a Zoom presentation or you know the screens are up high, then avoid putting important information down in the bottom third of your slides.
The Final Step
Now your slide show is ready to go. That’s it, right? Well, no, there’s one last step: practice. You only get a set amount of time when you present at a conference, usually 20 to 25 minutes, and it’s important to make the most of it.
Sometimes presenters will write their paper to whatever length they feel is good – usually journal article length, to make it easy to publish later – then do slides to go with that paper, assuming that it will all fit into the timeframe. But then they run out of time, and are like, “Oh, I was going to say all this other important stuff, but I guess that’s it,” They end on a really lame note, flicking quickly through the rest of their PowerPoint. The audience sees the slides go by and knows it has missed out on a good chunk of their argument, and probably some very interesting material as well.
(Ruth Jenkins-Robertsson in the 2016 rehearsal of New Zealand Opera production of Mozart's Magic Flute, Michael Bradley; CC-BY-SA-4.0)
Getting a friend’s feedback can also help with your practice, especially if you’re going to use a costume and props.
Sometimes presenters seem to be taken completely by surprise by their slides, saying things like, “Oh, that was the slide that I was supposed to go to,” or, “Oh, there was supposed to be a slide in there that showed the thing I was talking about.” Related to this is when people stumble over names, or the pronunciation of foreign words. They get flustered, and it gets super awkward, and it undermines their confidence.
All these issues are solved with practice. When you practise your paper out loud, you will know how long it goes for, whether it needs editing, or where you might stumble. When you practise speaking while clicking along with your slides, you will know if your fonts are legible, if your pictures are clear, if the slides are in the right order or if you’re missing any, and when they should appear. It even helps to mark in your text (for example, with an asterisk) where you click to your next slide. By practising, you will speak confidently and convincingly, supported by a PowerPoint that is helpful and engaging.
Conclusion
Our conference presentations are a chance to not only present our research to our peers, but also get them excited and interested in it, almost as much as we are. PowerPoint give us an opportunity to encourage that kind of positive reception by engaging our audiences visually. Our aim is to make our work accessible and understandable, and we do this by ensuring clarity, both in our words and in our slides, making sure our audience can (literally) see what we mean. Just to recap our tips have been:
- Use a darker/simple picture background
- When you text on the screen, immediately read it out
- Visualise your point, rather than spelling it out in words
- ONLY ONE IDEA PER SLIDE
- Make sure your pictures are law-abiding
- Pictures should be visible, in size and resolution
- Show people what they should be looking at
- Keep your captions short
- Keep your transitions and animations simple
- Practice
With these in our toolkit, we can do so much more than resorting to the wall of text or the templates that PowerPoint foists on its users. Let’s get creative and see how we can use slides to our advantage, using the wide variety of visual aids at our disposal – from backgrounds, to pictures, to attention‑focussing datasets – to enhance (not overshadow) our words and shine our research star brighter.
- David Phillips, “Death By PowerPoint”, https://youtu.be/Iwpi1Lm6dFo?si=jyIWBBfywcPJj6sy ↩︎
- If you’re using a lighter coloured background, then the focus point will be in a darker colour (to make it stand out more), and the non-focus points in a lighter colour. ↩︎