The times they are a-changin’.
This post seems to be older than 15 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.
In my Constitutional Law and Civil Rights class, we’re doing student presentations on Supreme Court Justices. There are 32 people in the class and in about 3 hours, we managed to get through 10 of them. That means that I’m going to be forced to sit with my eyelids glued open critiquing about nine hours of PowerPoints!
Holy crap.
Fortunately they haven’t been terribly atrocious, yet. My biggest pet peeves when it comes to PowerPoint presentations are:
- Horrible theme/background – is it really that hard to use something nice?
- Long, run on sentences and paragraphs that go on and on and on for no reason other then to just fill up the space of the slide and really provide no other reason and then tend to irritate the reader because the presenter is talking and I’m trying to read the slide but I can’t because it’s so freakin’ long. Six Words Per A Slide, Maximum!1
- Small font that no one can see. There’s a reason that Microsoft provides you with 24 pt font. Use it.
- Reading off the slide…word for word. Just don’t do it, okay? I’m not a preschooler; I assure you that I can read.
- Thus, under no circumstances should anyone ever have a slide that looks like this:
This is a real life example from today that I recreated for your viewing pleasure.
1 I actually usually have more then six words per a slide in my presentations. I’m trying to cut back, I promise. But the patch isn’t working like they said it would. And the professors limit the amount of slides you can have. So I’d end up having 6 x 20 = 120 words. Total. Not going to cut it.
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