Are you fueling your audience's distraction?

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A couple of weeks ago, I took a class on healthy sleep habits. It was a typical slide show with several bullets on each slide, interspersed with a few clipart images.

At one point, the instructor put up a slide with six bullets, each denoting a type of sleep disorder.

A woman in the back of the room immediately raised her hand. When the instructor called on her, the woman asked, "What's parasomnias?"

Parasomnias was the sixth bullet on the slide.

This is one of the best illustrations I've seen for why you don't want to put all your ideas on one slide! For goodness' sake, this woman couldn't wait for the instructor to get through the other five bullet points. She had to know what parasomnias were. NOW.

When you put all your ideas on the slide, you are asking for audience distraction. They may not raise their hands and ask you to jump ahead, but mentally, they already are.

Instead of giving your audience a reason to be reading ahead and not paying attention to what you're talking about at that moment, divide up your slide into its separate ideas.

If the slide was something like this:

I would break it out into six separate slides, something like this:

Remember, whether you have six ideas on one slide, or six slides with one idea each, the presentation takes the same amount of time!

Don't be afraid to spread out your ideas, giving each one the focus and attention it deserves, and keeping audience distractions to a minimum.

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