My podcast this week is from the Effective Public Speaking book.
Hope you enjoy it. This excerpt is a bit of a rant.
Also in video.
The Transcript:
I’m Johanna Rothman, and this is Johanna’s 60 Seconds of Writing WIP for July 19, 2024, where I read an excerpt of just a minute of some writing in progress.
This is from the Effective Public Speaking book.
Animate With Care
Several years ago, many speakers animated every single line on their slides, flying that line in as they read the words. I thought that was nuts and it gave me a headache. Two strikes against those speakers!
As an audience member, I felt that these speakers did not trust me to read the words and pay attention to the speaker. Instead, the speaker wanted to spoon-feed me information.
The speaker was correct. People cannot read the flying-in text and listen to the speaker. However, the answer was to put fewer lines of text on the slide, not animate the text in.
As a guideline, avoid animating text.
However, sometimes audiences do receive value from animation, even if it's “fake” animation. As I said, I animate images so I can build on a big idea through pieces of that image.
When I give presentations about how I write, I often build the idea through multiple slides. As an example, here’s my overall writing “process” image.
I use a total of six slides to describe the total process and then to break the process apart.