You Can’t Use a Sentence as a Prompt!

April 22, 2009 by Jerry

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In yesterday’s post you read about how using Microsoft PowerPoint for both presentations and documents creates many inefficient variations of the latter: speaker notes, uniform messages, leave-behinds, and send-aheads. Hopefully, yesterday’s post banished send-aheads forever; today we’ll aim to do the same to speaker notes.

A woman who is a senior engineering manager at a public telecom equipment company was one of the participants in a recent Power Presentations program. True to her technical nature, she wanted to be as accurate in her presentation as in her work; so when she headed up to the front of the room to deliver the pitch she had prepared, she brought along her laptop with her slides as speaker notes. Having diligently practiced, she started her pitch smoothly, but about a minute into it, she lost track of her content—a fate that befalls many people in front of live audiences. Her eyes darted down to the laptop for a cue and she suddenly froze. A horrified look came across her face and she blurted, “You can’t use a sentence as a prompt!”

In that one moment she understood the importance of the wedge, the difference between a presentation and a document. When her eyes went down to the slide, she saw a full sentence with all the necessary parts of speech: articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and helping verbs. That construct would have been necessary in a document which must be free-standing, independent of the presenter.

But in a presentation, where the presenter is the focus and the slides function only as support or illustration, bullets must be treated as headlines, containing only key words: nouns, verbs, and modifiers. Had the engineer followed that simple notion, she would have seen only a few words in her glance, more than enough to serve as a prompt. When she realized that a sentence with all its detailed parts is a hindrance rather than a help, she became an instant convert to the wedge.

One down, but there are still many, many more presenters to go in the quest to separate presentations from documents.

Tomorrow, you’ll see scientific support for the wedge.

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