Monday, April 16, 2007
Is your biggest competitor in the room with you?
“Cognitive load theory” is the name researchers in Australia have given the findings of a study that validates what many of us know intuitively: people can either listen or read, but they can rarely do both. That, in a nutshell, is why reading aloud a PowerPoint slide does little more than confuse and even irritate your audience.
Professor John Sweller at the University of New South Wales, says a human’s short-term memory is limited in how much it can process and retain information. When someone simply reads out loud the words on a screen, our brains get overloaded and we shut down, not absorbing the text or the voice we’re hearing. (Need more convincing? Click here to read the complete research findings.)
When creating a PowerPoint presentation, think about ways you can make your points using photographs, cartoons, graphs, illustrations, etc. Too often, we not only use cumbersome bullets, but we write them in complete sentences. Perhaps the better solution is not to use bullets at all, or to use them to reinforce points just made, rather than as a competitor to what we’re saying.
Remember the phrase, “a picture paints a thousand words.” So instead of trying to figure out which of the thousand words you want to put on the slide, think more about what image would capture your message in a simpler way.
Worried that once you leave your audience can’t remember the point you conveyed with an image? Then provide handouts with notes that accompany the image. But don’t take the lazy way out by populating your slides with the words you’re afraid you’ll forget!
Professor John Sweller at the University of New South Wales, says a human’s short-term memory is limited in how much it can process and retain information. When someone simply reads out loud the words on a screen, our brains get overloaded and we shut down, not absorbing the text or the voice we’re hearing. (Need more convincing? Click here to read the complete research findings.)
When creating a PowerPoint presentation, think about ways you can make your points using photographs, cartoons, graphs, illustrations, etc. Too often, we not only use cumbersome bullets, but we write them in complete sentences. Perhaps the better solution is not to use bullets at all, or to use them to reinforce points just made, rather than as a competitor to what we’re saying.
Remember the phrase, “a picture paints a thousand words.” So instead of trying to figure out which of the thousand words you want to put on the slide, think more about what image would capture your message in a simpler way.
Worried that once you leave your audience can’t remember the point you conveyed with an image? Then provide handouts with notes that accompany the image. But don’t take the lazy way out by populating your slides with the words you’re afraid you’ll forget!
# posted by Marilynn Mobley @ 10:26 AM 
