Don't use a 3D plot when a 2D plot will do

Many researchers have the habit of using three dimensions to display a two dimensional graph. There are worse examples than the one above, but it is both unnecessary and counter productive. First there is ambiguity as to where the tops of the bar lie. Second, there is no information contained in the third dimension. Remember, don't add any complexity that doesn't support the message you hope to convey.

This slide graph has lots of other problems. The fonts are too small and too dim. The vertical axis label needs to be written horizontally. The audience will waste a lot of time trying to read the axis rather than listening to the speaker. There is not so much information on this graph that it can't be made smaller to accommodate a horizontal label. The legend is also bad. I would simply print the words in red and gray colors (with bigger letters) and put them in the main part of the graph, no need for the little boxes. The title can be used to help guide the audience toward the main message, perhaps, "There Has Been a Steady Increase in Clinical Research Services."

Should you leave your slides behind after the talk?

One of the main themes of this website is that slides should not stand on their own, or else why are you giving an oral presentation? A slide presentation is a synergy between the audio and the visual. A visually effective slide may not have all the information and explanation needed for an audience to understand it without the spoken explanation. Usually such explanations would make the slide too busy to comprehend in a presentation format.

Often I get the statement, "but I have all this detail on the slide because I want it to stand on its own, because I'm going to leave the slides behind after the talk." Of course the consequence is that the audience won't understand the complicated slide during the presentation.

The answer is the "Notes" command found on PowerPoint or other commands in other presentation software packages. The "Notes" command allows reproduction of the slide at half size and provides space for text which you can use to (partly) compensate for the lack of spoken explanation. So if you plan on leaving your slides behind, annotate them with the "Notes" command and leave them with text explanations that compensate for your not being their to explain what is a simpler but visually more effective slide.

The vexing text slide

You would think that the all text slide would be the easiest kind of slide to present, but I have seen many speakers fumble them. They don't know whether to read the slide, let the audience read the slide, or speak to their separate notes which they have at the podium.

As the first bullet states, the answer of course is to do none of the above. As the second bullet implies, the only reason to have an all text slide is to display some structure to your thinking: the main points and any sub sections. If you are not trying to display a structure visually then you don't need a slide. Why make the audience read and listen at the same time? So in effect the slide is the speaker's notes. Since a presentation is a synergy between the visual and the oral, the role of the speaker is to amplify each item while they are using the pointer to show the audience which item is being addressed.

In other words the text slide should be a visual slide. It should provide a visual depiction of how you are thinking. In the example below there are four main point and two subpoints. There is also an overlay (in red) which I used after showing the initial slide.

The overlay refers back to a previous "tip," all text slides should have less than 40 words (count the title). The above slide has 30. Yes, 40 is arbitrary, but it is also a useful discipline. During the course I teach it is not uncommon for a student to present a slide with 70 or 80 words. We can always cut this down to 40, or less, without losing content. The key is remember that your voice can amplify what is on the slide. With the red overlay, this slide now has 39 words.