This lesson is all about creating slides to support a presentation. We'll talk about the purpose of using slides in an oral presentation and what elements are necessary. Then, you'll learn how to create slides that are clear and easy to read. Have you ever heard of death by PowerPoint? This refers to the overuse of slides and the use of slides that are really difficult to read. The result is that audiences get very bored or possibly even frustrated. So let's get a couple of things clear. Remember that you are the main event, not your slides. Slides support your presentation. They do not give your talk. Everything you say should not be on the slides. There are lots of videos on the internet about how to make a great presentation and a lot of great public speakers are giving advice. One example is a man named Guy Kawasaki. He's a well-known entrepreneur in the United States and he's also well-known as a public speaker. He has a simple rule for presentations, the 10, 20, 30 rule. No more than 10 slides. Don't speak for more than 20 minutes. And your smallest font size should be 30. Before we begin to talk about rules, let's look at vocabulary related to slides that you make on a computer. We'll be using these words a lot as we go through good and bad examples of slides. First, font. Font is the type that you use, for example, Times New Roman or Arial. Font size you can see here is 11 point or 28 point. Upper and lower case means capital letters or not capitalized. The word graphics refers to visuals like images or design elements. Text means words. I think you know that a paragraph is a group of sentences about one topic like this one explaining a paragraph. We use paragraphs to write messages. We don't use paragraphs in slides. We often use lists in slides, and item means each thing that is listed. Most lists in slides are bulleted with some kind of a bullet mark in front of each item. A bullet point is an item in a list marked by a bullet. So the first guideline is to limit the number of slides. Some people agree with Guy Kawasaki and say that you should never have more than 10 slides. But it really depends. Maybe you only need three. Maybe you need 15. Write your ideas first, then decide which points a slide would help you illustrate. Ask yourself, is this slide really necessary? The second guideline is to use graphics and visuals, not text, meaning words, as much as possible. Third, limit the number of words on your slides. We're going to talk more about that in a minute. Last, as you learned in the last lesson, don't read from your slides. People don't like reading something and then hearing the presenter say it. If you put words on the screen, say your points first, then show the words. That way, people don't have to listen twice. By the way, you may be wondering about the use of our slides in this course. Definitely don't imitate these slides in your own presentations. We're putting all these points on slides to help you as you listen, because this is a course. We wouldn't do that in a presentation. Now I'm going to show you some common mistakes that people make when they create slides. Look at each slide and decide what the major problem is. The font size is too small here. Your smallest font size should be 30 point. Now people in the audience would be able to read it. This chart clearly does not support your presentation, because no one can read it. Make a different slide that highlights the point you wanted to make with data from this slide. This is much more effective. Notice the citation on all of these slides. Be sure to indicate where you got your data on the slide. It's okay to use all caps in the heading of a slide, but don't use caps for more than one or two words. It's difficult to read. There are two ways you can improve this slide. One is to change from all caps to use uppercase for the first letter and lowercase for the rest. The other is to keep all caps, but shorten the heading. Then when you introduce the slide, you can provide the rest with something like, let's look at travel preferences of millennials. Or, what about millennials? What are their travel preferences? I often see students put complete definitions on a slide. Remember that no one wants to read your presentation. They want to hear it. If you give a definition, use a graphic or a few words, not a complete sentence. In fact, never write a complete sentence on a slide unless it's a short quote. Of course, this would be an easy definition to show with a graphic or just the general age range. This looks too busy with all these different types of fonts, doesn't it? I think this one is much easier to read. So limit how many different fonts and point sizes you use. It's best only to use two or three different ones. So there's one more problem with this slide and all of these slides with statistics. Remember earlier, I pointed out the citation on the slides. These statistics came from a survey that Choice Hotels International did. So let's add a citation right here. Here it is. In a presentation, just like in anything printed, you need to cite your sources. In the resource section of this lesson, I'll add a link to a website that shows you how to cite sources in presentations. Again, this slide is too busy. Any one of these could work well by itself. Too busy. It's fine to alternate colors, but don't use more than two. Three of the most. We can't read this one. One possibility is to change the color of the font. You could also make the photo smaller or use a text box with a different background over the photo. This color combination may look okay on your computer, but there's not enough contrast for it to show up well when you project it. Choose colors that have a much bigger contrast between them. This means use a dark color for the background and a very light color for the text, like white or yellow. This slide is very similar to one that you looked at a few minutes ago. It doesn't look so bad, but it breaks a rule for slides. I'll tell you about the rule, and then we'll fix this slide. The rule is called the 666 rule. The first six is for the number of words in any bullet point. Never have more than six. And then, never have more than six bullet points on a slide. And last, never have more than six slides in a row with bullet points. As you can see, we just broke the rule with our third bullet point here. Let's fix that. Okay, so let's look at this slide again. It breaks the 666 rule because each sentence has more than six words. Let's see if we can use short phrases to fix that here. Here's one idea. It has short verb phrases. As you talk, you would put them into sentences, but the audience doesn't need to read the complete sentences. Here's the same idea, but with noun phrases. Another idea would be to use images with the statistics rather than words on the slide. On the topic of bullet points, can you see any problems with this slide? It's not the color using two colors to alternate bullet points is okay. There are two other problems. One is a small problem. Some of the items begin with a capital letter and some don't. The other bigger problem is that the items are different types of phrases. Making items consistent is always difficult, but let's change the slide and make them all nouns. Okay, I've re-worded a bit, but now they're all consistent. They're all noun phrases. This is not easy to do, but it's important. Next, please turn the spell check on when you make your slides. And if possible, have someone check your slides for words that the spell checker doesn't catch. In my last point, animation. Having your slides fly in with all sorts of effects is not very professional. On the other hand, it's not fun to be in an audience and finish reading a slide way before the speaker goes through each point. So use a simple appear animation to have each point appear as you speak. Your audience will thank you.