Tim Harford’s Presentations the lazy way really cuts to the core of the problem with most presentations and offers some interesting advice to avoid those problems,
Don’t write a script. If you’re going to write a script, it has to sound like a real person talking. This is widely recognised to be hard work. Writing something down which sounds like a real person talking is the kind of thing that wins Quentin Tarantino Oscars. If you’re Quentin Tarantino, by all means write your script. Otherwise, cut out the hard work and achieve that elusive effect of sounding like a real person talking by… talking.
Don’t create any slides. We all know that it is important to give the modern audience something interesting to look at, and maybe you fancy yourself Piet Mondrian instead of Tarantino. But unless you really are Mondrian, which I doubt, you don’t stand much change of creating anything worth looking at with a piece of software like PowerPoint.
. . .
Produce quality not quantity. Dig up a single good one-liner, an excellent analogy or example, and perhaps one striking new piece of information. (Here’s an idea – put one of them in your first five seconds and one more in your last five seconds.) If you must have slides, then create just one useful one rather than twenty useless ones. (Lazy tip: press ‘B’ when you’re not speaking and the PowerPoint slideshow will go blank. That way you don’t need to wallpaper your whole talk with bullet points.)
Of course the joke is that the “lazy way” is actually a lot harder than the typical way. It doesn’t take too much time at all to start with a half-baked idea or barely thought-through concept, add 20 or 30 slides with a plethora of bullet points, and voila, you’ve got the penultimate PowerPoint presentation.
Talk like a real person? Don’t rely on bullet point crutches? That’s hard work.