More on slide decks

When creating a slide deck for - say - a conference presentation, we put ALL the references that we cite in our notes, on each slide; which is called a multiple works citation (American Psychological Association, 2019). And the reason why we put the multiple works on the slide is because when we are presenting at our conference, we do not share our speaker notes with our audience. We only share our slides. Without our referenced script, if we didn't have a multiple works citation on each slide, the audience would have no idea of where and what our reference list connected to.

For example, the following image shows all the sources on the slide, and where they are embedded in the notes area:

If the multiple works citation wasn't on the slide, the audience would only have the Shakespeare citation. They would be effectively unaware of the other four sources drawn upon. So the multiple works citation is essential for our audience.

Further, we need to remember that our slides shouldn't be too text heavy. The example slide here has 34 words in the body of the slide - close to Tufte's maximum of 40 words per slide (2003). And it looks a bit crowded, even though it is under 40. The notes area contains 306 words of the speaker notes.

Why do we keep the text on the slides brief? We want the slides to anchor and support what we say; not to interfere with it. Luckily, if the slide text is short, because we read at roughly 250-300 wpm "much faster than spoken language understanding [while...] audiobooks are spoken at a rate of 140–180 wpm" (Brysbaert, 2019 p. 3) our audience will read in a fraction of time and be able to refocus on what we are saying. We don't want our audience to be distracted from what we are saying by reading the slides. Brysbaert also noted that "while we are listening to a person speaking, we simultaneously have an internal conversation preparing to make a response", which may also mean the audience may stop listening to the presentation (2019. p. 3).

So, to keep our audience focused on us, we put only simple signposting on each slide. If our slides look too crowded, then we trim - slash to the bone - and push our words into our script in the notes. We can get creative and use diagrams, images, and Ishikawa's fishbone model (FabianLange, 2008, read more here) instead.

We need to keep our slide decks short, focused, and provide a map back to our evidential base.

Sam

References:

American Psychological Association. (2019). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: The official guide to APA style (7th ed.). Author.

Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109(1), 104047, 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047

FabianLange. (2008). ;Ishikawa fishbone diagram ;(Creative Commons 3.0) [image]. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ishikawa_Fishbone_Diagram.svg

Tufte, E. R. (2003). The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. Graphics Press LLC.