Presentation Skills Training Malaysia | How to Convert the Content into a Slide Presentation

Now that you have your content organized and in outline form, it’s time to convert it into a presentation. This is probably one of the hardest steps and most often omitted or neglect- ed. Presenters may just put their outline directly into a presentation, without taking any time to pull out the proper information and create bullet points from the outline’s main points.

By just converting your outline into a presentation, you’re preparing for disaster. You won’t engage the participants because you’ll be reading from the slides and you’ll lose them very quickly because they’ll be overwhelmed by the amount of information on the slides.

From Outline to Bullets

Reduce your outline to the essentials your audience needs to know for you to reach your objective. Make your point as you speak—don’t put the whole point on the slide. Ask yourself, “Will putting this information on the slide help me reach my objective of this presentation?”

Here are some key rules to follow when creating bulleted text:

1. Use one concept per slide.

2. Use key words and phrases (noun and verbs).

3. Stay within the 8 x 8 rule.

4. Make your bullet points consistent in structure.

5. Capitalize properly.

Use One Concept per Slide

You need to spoon-feed your audience the information. Just like a baby won’t accept more than one spoonful of food at a time, your audience will not accept more than one concept per slide.

Remember: feed them with a spoon, not a bulldozer.

Use Key Words and Phrases

To create bullets from your outline, use key words and phrases, primarily nouns and verbs. If you put just the essentials on your slides, you’ll engage your participants: they’ll want to know more about these key words and phrases. So, once again, the focus is on you, not your slides. If you recreate your script word-for-word on your slides, participants will stop listening to you. Also, long sentences take participants longer to read and absorb.

Another argument for the minimalist approach: the more words you use, the harder it is to fit the text onto your slides. And it’s a waste of time.

Here are some keys to creating your bullet points from the outline:

1. Be as concise as possible.

2. Use action words or verbs.

3. Delete non-impact words such as “while,” “that,” and “but.”

4. Do not use intensifying adverbs such as “really” and “very.”

Stay Within the 8 x 8 Rule

What is the 8 x 8 rule? The 8 x 8 rule helps us not to over- whelm our audience with too much information and it should ensure that all the members of your audience can view and read the text.

The rule is to have no more than eight lines of text per slide and no more than eight words per line. You should be able to stick to this simple rule if you use only key words or phrases.

It’s possible to stretch this rule a little, depending on the font you use. For instance, you may be able to get 12 words per line if you use a condensed font, like Arial Condensed. But it’s best not to find ways to get around this rule.

Try sticking to the 8 x 8 rule when converting your outline to bulleted text. This will ensure that your text is big enough for all participants to read, even from the back of the room.

Applying this rule will also help the spoon-feeding process.

Make Your Bullet Points Consistent in Structure

It’s important to start your bullet points with either a noun or verb and put them in the same tense (past, present, future) and voice (active or passive). This parallel structure will help your audience understand your point more quickly.

Here’s an example. Compare these two sets of bullets in terms of ease of reading and impact.

1. Created several outlines

2. Review of the topic

3. The theme will be sold

vs.

1. Create several outlines

2. Review the topic

3. Sell the theme

Most people would consider the second set of bullets to be easier to read and to have greater impact, because of their parallel sentence structure.

Using parallel sentence structure helps your audience read through your bullet points quicker. It also helps you create bullets that are more concise and to the point.

Capitalize Properly

Capitalization is a very controversial topic. Can I use all capital letters? Should I capitalize the first letter of every word? Do I capitalize at all?

Here’s the key. Adults have subconsciously memorized the shape of lowercase words, as in reading a book, a newspaper, or a magazine. So, if you put your text in all capital letters, it takes them longer to make words out of the groups of letters and phases out of the groups of words. If you capitalize the first letter of every word, they have to stop and read each word separately, then go back and comprehend the meaning of the phrase as a whole. When you capitalize the first letter of the first word only, they see it as a whole and can understand it faster.

We’re used to reading text in sentence format. Remember this when creating your bullets. Treat each bullet point as a sentence without punctuation. Capitalize only the first letter of the first word and any proper nouns in your bullet points. This is called sentence case. For the titles of your slides, it is accept- able to capitalize the first letter of every word. This is called title case. This will draw more attention to the titles of your slides, so participants take a little more time to read the titles, which puts a little more emphasis on the new information you’re about to discuss. But avoid using all caps: text that’s all uppercase is harder to read.