Building Persuasive PowerPoint Presentations

Beware of dull PowerPoint presentations! To help avoid losing your viewers' interest, check out the following advice for building a persuasive presentation — one that brings the audience around to your side:

• Start by writing the text in Word: Start in Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint, and work from an outline. You can see your presentation take shape by working from a Word outline, and you can even import a Word outline straight into a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, PowerPoint has a special command for importing text files from Word, so you won't lose any time by writing the early drafts of your presentation in Word.

• When choosing a design, consider the audience: A presentation to the American Casketmakers Association calls for a mute, quiet design; a presentation to the Cheerleaders of Tomorrow calls for something bright and splashy. Choose a slide design that sets the tone for your presentation and wins the empathy of the audience.

Start from the conclusion: Try writing the end of the presentation first. A presentation is supposed to build to a rousing conclusion. By writing the end first, you have a target to shoot for. You can make the entire presentation service its conclusion, the point at which your audience says, "Ah-ha! She's right."

• Make clear what you're about: In the early going, state very clearly what your presentation is about and what you intend to prove with your presentation. In other words, state the conclusion at the beginning as well as the end. This way, your audience will know exactly what you're driving at and be able to judge your presentation according to how well you build your case.

• Make like a newspaper: Put a newspaper-style headline at the top of each slide, and think of each slide as a newspaper article. Each slide should address a specific aspect of your subject, and it should do so in a compelling way. A PowerPoint slide should stay on-screen for roughly the time it takes to explore a single topic the way a newspaper article does.

• Follow the one-slide-per-minute rule: At the very minimum, a slide should stay on-screen for at least one minute. If you have been given 15 minutes to speak, you're allotted no more than 15 slides for your presentation, according to the rule.

Beware the bullet point: Terse bullet points have their place in a presentation, but if you put them there strictly to remind yourself what to say next, you're doing your audience a disfavor. Bullet points can cause drowsiness and be distracting. The audience skims the bullets when it should be attending to your voice and the argument you're making. (PowerPoint lets you write speaker notes that the audience doesn't see. If having notes to yourself is what you're after, use the speaker notes, not bullet points in slides.)

• Use graphics and charts to make your point: A good pie chart or bar chart that bolsters your argument is ideal and irrefutable. As shown in Figure 1, the clip art that comes with Office includes many cartoon-like graphics that can be wonderful for PowerPoint presentations. If you can, use these humorous clip-art images to make your case.

• Blank out the screen for dramatic effect: Show a blank screen when you come to the crux of your presentation and you want the audience's undivided attention. (You can blank out the screen by pressing B, which gives you a black screen, or by pressing W, which gives you a white screen. Press B or W again and a slide reappears).

When seeing the blank screen, the audience will focus all attention on you. What you say will have more impact. By removing PowerPoint momentarily, you give yourself the chance to talk straight into the heart of your audience.