Why do so many business presenters continue to fill their slides with words rather than images? We all complain when we are bombarded by such slides, read monotonously by the presenter yet we often repeat the mistake ourselves – Doh!

Well I think one of the reasons is that many people were taught that if tour audience see your message as well as hear it then recall improves.

The problem is that “seeing words” is not the same as “seeing pictures”. When we read words on a screen we tend to say them silently to ourselves as we read them meaning that we are processing the words using the auditory centres of the brain rather than the visual centres. Hence, sine we are listening to the speaker at the same time as “listening” to his or her slides, the result is cognitive dissonance as we hear and read at different speeds. Imagine the effect of listening to a recording of a speech through headphones, where the speed of the recording coming in to your right ear was slower than the speed of the words in your left ear! Isn’t that guaranteed to fry to brain!

So the solution is simple. Replace most of the words in your slides with images that convey the same meaning as what you are saying but in a complimentary way.

Let me know how you get on or show me some examples of how you have implemented this idea for real – I’ll publish the best examples on this blog.