Presentation Graphics Meet Linguistics

February 18, 2009 by Jerry

Matt Vasey, who is the Director of the American Distribution Channel at Microsoft Corporation, was a participant in a recent Power Presentations program at the Redmond campus. During the session on graphics design, one of his colleagues showed a bullet slide arranged in the format above. Matt gave his commentary about the content and then concluded, “I’m not crazy about that glottal stop.”

His words stopped me in my tracks.

A glottal stop is an esoteric phonetics term referring to an action of the vocal cords snapping shut over the glottis, the space between the cords, during speech. The action produces a sharp, unattractive sound, and Matt was clearly referring to the unattractive spacing in the bullet lines.

I asked, “How do you know about glottal stops?”

Matt replied, “I took a linguistics course in college.”

While Matt was using the term analogously, he was also inadvertently bringing together graphics design and voice, two of the basic components in presentations.

Unfortunately, in common presentation practice, these elements are often treated as two distinct entities. This separation results in dissociation between what the presenter says and what the presenter shows. It’s like watching a film with an out of sync sound track, and is as distracting for a presentation audience as it is for a movie audience.

There is simple way to bring to the two components together in your presentation.

Whenever you display a slide, use your voice to help your audience understand what they are seeing. Use the Title Plus to describe your slide. Title Plus is a succinct statement that captures the entire content of the slide.

Design each slide with a single line title that conveys the main point. Each slide also has additional material below the title – bullets, graphs, icons, pictures, tables—that is the plus. Then, every time you click to a new slide, tell your audience what you’ve shown them using the Title Plus:

“Here you see five years of annual revenues.”
“This table compares our product to all others.”
“These are the benefits of our product.”

Title Plus synchronizes your graphics with your linguistics, and synchronizes you with your audience. (You can learn more about Title Plus in Chapters 11 and 12 of The Power Presenter.)

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