Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test? - Nancy Duarte

by Nancy Duarte | 11:00 AM October 22, 2012 An audience can’t listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus — the road — to process billboard information. Keep It Simple Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they’re stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each slide to remember who you work for? It’s also important to stick to a consistent visual style in your slide deck. Consider the “before” slide below. Flow. Contrast. White space. Hierarchy. Unity.

3 tips for TED speakers (and other talkers) 10 Ways to Prepare for a TED-format Talk These 18-minute talks are hard to do. It’s easier to blather on for an hour than talk for a tight 18 minutes knowing that if you go over, you (literally) will get the hook. The talks I give usually take me a comfortable 45 minutes but I needed to get the insights out in 18 minutes. The culling process forces you to convey only the most important information for spreading your idea. I delivered one talk at TEDxEast and was thrilled to look up at the clock just as it was ticking down with :06 seconds left on the clock. Here are the ten steps I went through in rehearsing for my talks. 1. I trimmed and trimmed and trimmed until I felt like it was close to 18 minutes. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Secrets From a TED2013 Speaker: Preparing for the "Talk of One's Life" 5 Ways to Help Your Students Become Better Questioners The humble question is an indispensable tool: the spade that helps us dig for truth, or the flashlight that illuminates surrounding darkness. Questioning helps us learn, explore the unknown, and adapt to change. That makes it a most precious “app” today, in a world where everything is changing and so much is unknown. And yet, we don’t seem to value questioning as much as we should. For the most part, in our workplaces as well as our classrooms, it is the answers we reward -- while the questions are barely tolerated. To change that is easier said than done. How to Encourage Questioning 1. Asking a question can be a scary step into the void. 2. This is a tough one. 3. Part of the appeal of “questions-only” exercises is that there’s an element of play involved, as in: Can you turn that answer/statement into a question? 4. 5. If the long-term goal is to create lifelong questioners, then the challenge is to make questioning a habit -- a part of the way one thinks.