HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations (HBR Guide Series)

Create Slides People Can “Get” in Three Seconds

Audiences can process only one stream of information at a time. They’ll either listen to you speak or read your slides—they won’t do both simultaneously (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway). So make sure they can quickly comprehend your visuals and then turn their attention back to what you’re saying.

Let’s say you’re using the default template in PowerPoint, and you completely fill in the field that says “Click to Add Text” each time you create a slide. That field holds about 80 words, and the average reading speed is 250 words per minute. So, if you develop 40 text-heavy slides for a 40-minute presentation, people will miss about 13 minutes (one-third!) of your talk just because ...