Writing PowerPoint Presentations

How to prepare effective speaker support that complements your verbal delivery

The Purpose of Speaker Support

Slide decks primarily serve two purposes. They enhance the way you communicate the messages of your presentation, and help audiences follow the progression of ideas more easily. Keep those purposes in mind as we offer our ten practical tips for writing PowerPoint presentations.

Do You Need a Slide Deck?

This is a good fundamental question to kick off with. Don’t feel compelled to create speaker support if you don’t need it. To illustrate the case for not writing PowerPoint presentations, try watching some TED Talks. Many TED presenters can deliver their entire session without showing a single slide.

Consider your need for a slide deck in the context of the two purposes. Will writing one enhance the way you communicate the messages? Do you need to communicate concepts that audiences need a little help to follow? If you think you can engage and inspire without a deck, then just focus on your verbal delivery.

Incidentally, we have a separate article that provides tips on how you can talk like TED.

Use a Template

Slide decks should be enjoyable to look at, or neat at the very least. So why not make writing PowerPoint presentations easy for yourself? Most organisations have a dedicated PowerPoint template that does a great deal of the heavy lifting for you in terms of design, layout, fonts and colours. You may even have an image library you can draw from.

If you don’t, PowerPoint comes with its own standard templates that serve the same purpose. Find one that feels close to your brand, and tailor it slightly to your own corporate colours. Presenting with the brand in mind shows you have the organisation in mind.

Consider How the Deck Will be Used

A slide deck must function as speaker support, but ask yourself if yours needs to serve another purpose, such as emailing it to those who cannot attend.

In an ideal world, you would create two decks – one for delivery that contains only what you need to communicate your messages, and one for dissemination that tells the full story. But that may not be practical with the time and resources available. Sometimes, you need to create a hybrid deck that serves both purposes.

To create an effective hybrid deck, try to find a balance between supporting your delivery and telling a story that works on its own. If you can’t do that succinctly, then you really need to consider creating two decks.

Keep the Deck Short

As a loose guide, the slide deck for a half-hour presentation is usually around 8 to 12 slides, bearing in mind the inclusion of a title slide at the start and a summary slide towards the end. That works out at around 2.5 to 3.5 minutes of talking per slide.

In some cases, you may need more slides, but don’t be afraid to use fewer. You should be talking around your slides rather than narrating them for the audience. Remember that the slides support you, and not the other way around.

Tell the Story Through Structure

Writing PowerPoint presentations can be easier if you craft them as a story. That means creating a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Let’s say you have a deck with ten slides. The beginning of your presentation will span the title slide plus slide two. Together, these explain what you are going to talk about and why. If you are following the common convention of discussing ‘challenge and solution’, then this is where you provide an overview of both.

The end of your presentation is likely to span the final two slides. Slide nine could summarise the key points of the presentation while slide ten could focus on the conclusion or call to action.

That leaves you six slides in the middle to cover the main points. If that sounds too few, bear in mind this is a verbally delivered presentation and the audience can only absorb so much before they start to become overloaded.

Check out our advice on how to include the power of storytelling in your presentation.

Do You Need Text?

This is another fundamental question when writing PowerPoint presentations. In a commercial environment, bullet points seem like an obligatory requirement. Unfortunately, they are often the least effective way to enhance the communication of messages. Graphics and images are far better for bringing your words to life, so think visually whenever possible.

Generally speaking, text is useful if you need to communicate something complex, or you need the audience to keep a number of things in mind to fully appreciate a larger message. Naturally, you also need to use text when creating a hybrid deck for presentation and dissemination.

One Primary Message Per Slide

Let’s focus on the six middle slides of our ten-slide deck, which is where we convey the bulk of the information. Dedicate each slide to one of your primary messages. A good starting point is to use the primary message as the title of the slide.

If you decide to use text to reinforce the primary message, then try to limit each slide to between three and five short phrases that are effortless to read for the audience.

Your PowerPoint template may stipulate a font and point size. Otherwise, stick to clear fonts such as Arial with a point size that can be read easily from the back of the room. Use simple vocabulary and try to find an ideal arrangement of words that counterpoint the verbal message you will be delivering at the time.

Bear in mind that audiences read slides as soon as you show them, which means their attention is temporarily diverted. Make sure you don’t discuss anything significant while they read. This is another reason to keep text light. The more you add, the longer you lose their attention every time you change slides.

Vary Your Slide Format

Repetition quickly becomes boring so try to give each slide its own personality. If you need to use text, avoid the same pattern of vertically cascading bullet points. For example, why not have three phrases horizontally across the slide and associate an image with each? One of your primary messages may simply need a powerful full-slide image with a single short line of text.

There are many other things you can do to add interest such as including relevant statistics, short quotes, and infographics. Consider the best approach for each individual slide, but make sure everything works together across the full presentation.

Benefits-Led Throughout

Humans are subjective creatures that tend to think about their own needs before the needs of a group. That doesn’t mean they aren’t working hard for the benefit of the group, but always keep this aspect of individual psychology in mind.

You may have heard the phrase “What’s in it for me?” Wherever possible, craft your messages in terms of the benefits to both the group and the individual. For example, saving time and effort, helping people to achieve more, and delivering greater career opportunities.

Get the Start and End Right

Great presentations have compelling openings and inspiring endings, so spend time making sure yours have impact.

Your opening should introduce the subject and present the high-level value of it for the organisation and individual. You also want something that makes your audience sit up, so try to think of a new perspective they haven’t considered before. A great business writing technique is to start with a fascinating question and use the presentation to answer it. You can even make this the overall title of the presentation on the first slide.

For your ending, summarise the primary messages and include a call to action. In our ten-slide presentation that uses primary messages as slide titles, you could simply carry forward those titles to the summary slide. However, you may wish to rephrase them for maximum impact. Following that, try to finish on a compelling final sentence that underpins all of your messages. Our article on how to end effective presentations will help, as will our article on the seven laws of presentation success.