Crafting the Effective Bullet Slide

You'll recall that I use the Problem/Solution Flow Structure in my programs and in this book. In most of the previous chapters, I've begun by asking you to think about presentation problems. In the same spirit, let's look at a particularly problematic bullet slide in Figure 7.2.

Figure 7.2. How not to design a bullet slide.

Does this look familiar? When I show this slide during my program, the groans and laughter from the participants make it clear that slides like this are all too common. This is a true Data Dump slide, one that is desperately in need of surgery.

First, consider the two-line title. It requires an extra eye sweep. In this book, your eyes traverse a page that is only a few inches wide. In your presentations, the eyes of your audience will have to travel several feet across a large projection screen. The more you make the eyes of your audience travel, the harder they have to work. Be an Audience Advocate! Replace the two-line title with a one-liner that states a single concept.

Next, notice that the subtitle, which adds new information, makes the audience do extra work not only to interpret the new information, but also to determine its relationship to the main title. Instead, replace it with a subtitle that relates easily and obviously back to the main title. Better still, eliminate the subtitle altogether. Less Is More .

Next, consider the first bullet. It's written with all the parts of speech that make a bullet into a sentence . This gives the audience more work to do by adding extra eye sweeps . Simplify the bullet into a newspaper-style headline. Do the same with all the other bullets and with the sub-bullets as well.

Now for a subtle, but important point: The default in most graphics and word processing programs is to mark a sub-bullet with a dash. This means that several sub-bullets will create a ladder of dashes. What does a dash mean to a financial person? It is a minus sign, which means a negative.

You don't want your audience to go there . Avoid the subtle, subconscious , negative message sent by the dash. You could change the default symbol to a dot, which is an improvement, but still clutters the slide. Get rid of the Morse-code effect of dots or dashes completely by tabbing the sub-bullets. The space creates the offset; the space makes less out of more.

Avoid the subtle, subconscious, negative message sent by the dash.

Finally, do we really need all those sub-bullets? The answer is usually "No." Sub-bullets often add a layer of complexity and an extra burden for the audience without any offsetting benefit. Remember, you the presenter provide the body text. You'll have ample opportunity during your presentation to spell out the details that support the headline bullets.

Now we have a clean graphic, as you can see in Figure 7.3.

Figure 7.3. Less Is More bullet slide.

To summarize:

• The Less Is More bullet slide contains one concept, expressed in a one-line title.

• The subtitle has been omitted.

• Bullets contain key words only such as nouns, verbs, and modifiers. Avoid using articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. (Especially avoid using prepositions; not only do they add an extra word, they juxtapose and separate important words. Instead of writing a bullet such as "Strengths of our Company," rewrite it as "Our Company Strengths.")

To make your bullet slide clean and crisp, try to follow the 4 x 4 formula: four lines down, four words across; or, if the subject warrants , you can go up to 6 x 4: six lines down, but still only four words across. A final benefit: With only one set of bullet symbols, visible at the first glance, both you and your audience get a quick snapshot of the total.