In the first chapter of They Snooze You Lose by Lynell Burmark (2011), the author explores briefly some things you can do to make your presentations immediately better. She addresses color, backgrounds, centering, capitalizing, images and the number of words on each slide.
Some of the tips that are mentioned are things I have always done, and seem fairly self explanitory. For example, backgrounds should not be a distraction from what you are trying to present. (Burmark, 2011). And some of the tips, while not in and of themselves surprising, had interesting research numbers of which I was not aware, such as color increasing willingness to read and retention (Burmark, 2011). I did know that color was important to presentations, and that color could make my presentation better. I did not know that it would make people more willing to read my presentation, and better able to remember my presentation. Two things directly conflicted to what I had been taught about presentations. The first was that headings should not be centered, but left justified. Certainly, it makes perfect sense that since we read from left to right, we should start our text in the left hand corner. But I have been taught always that titles should be centered. The second was that all capital letters should not be used in the title. I was taught that capital letters grab attention and make titles appear more important. According to Burmark (2011) all they do is make the text harder to read.
References
Burmark, L. (2011). They Snooze, You Lose: The Educator's Guide to Successful Presentations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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