[MUSIC] Welcome to module four. Write and design powerful slides for powerful presentations. A good presentation would not be as powerful without a well-designed set of visual slides. So in this module, we'll look at how to organize PowerPoint slides and how to write and design effective slides in lesson 1. And in lesson 2, we'll look at some of the trickier parts of English. Using articles, a, an, the, and count and non-count nouns correctly and effectively in the text we write for slides and other business documents. Let's begin with our first lesson. Why include slides when you're making your presentation? I'm sure that most of you have sat through a presentation and felt confused or bored. I know I have. This can happen when slides are hard to read, confusing, or just repeat everything the speaker says. But slides with text, visuals and graphics that illustrate and add to your message enhance a presentation, and help keep your audience focused and engaged. So if you plan well, effective slides will add to your presentation. Let's start by looking at two slides from the beginning of a presentation and choose which would capture interest. The slide you picked, probably caught your interest and engaged you, while the other seemed less clear and boring. So how do you avoid boring, confusing slide presentations? First, organize your slides so your listeners will focus on you and your message. An easy, efficient way to do this is to organize your slides in three parts. An opening section of one or two slides. The content section, with all the slides you need to illustrate the main points of your talk, and a closing section with again, just one or two slides. You should not include a slide for everything you say, rather include slides only to highlight your most important points, and to add clarity through explanatory text or visuals. As you're speaking, you might say, we offer website and social media services to many of our local retailers and service businesses. But on the actual slide, your text will simply say, what we do. And illustrate your services with a picture or two. Now let's look at how to write your best text possible. As you have learned and practiced throughout this course, the best business writing is brief, clear and direct. This is especially true for presentation slides. You do not want to read your slides to the audience like a script. To make this happen, I recommend you only put short, concise lines of text. With no more than five or six words per line. Therefore, you must choose the words for your slides very carefully and only include the most informative. At times you will need to delete some words from your text, let's try doing this together. Here is something you might say in a presentation. Over the last five years, we have helped more than 50 local businesses create dynamic websites, which have increased their sales and maximized their profits. Now think about the most important words to keep on your slide and delete the rest. The sentence on your slide might look like this. Websites increase sales and maximize profits. How do you think we can shorten this one? As we help you successfully navigate social media, you'll find your business and profits growing with each new post or tweet. Again, here's the shorter version in six words. At other times, you may not include any text at all, and just add a picture or graphic that is relevant to your topic. Another way to ensure that your text is clear and easy to understand, is to have parallel structures when you include a list on a slide. Non-parallel structure is especially confusing and hard to read. So keep nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs, phrases with phrases and sentences with sentences. Can you spot where this slide gets confusing? That's right. The third bullet point starts with a verb, unlike the other two. So all of a sudden, the list of services may sound confusing. Equally confusing and embarrassing on slides, are spelling and capitalization errors, especially of names and other proper nouns. In general, it's also helpful to capitalize key words in your titles, and the first word of every line in a list. Now let's talk about slides design. Once you have prepared your text and organized your slides, you need to think about how your slides will work. A simple clean design is the best way to make your information stand out, and to keep your viewers focused and interested. Just as you want to avoid too many words, you also want to avoid too many different design elements. These include font styles, sizes and colors. As well as graphic items like bullets, numbers, boxes and arrows. Let's look at eat of those separately. First, font style. It's best to choose one type style. Preferable Sans Serif font like Arial or Helvetica. With clean lines and no extra details on the letters. These are easy to read on screen and won't distract the listener or reader from understanding your message. Next, size. While you can use different sizes of type on a slide, avoid having more than two or three type sizes per page. Font size per slides generally ranges from about 20 to 40 points. However, no matter what size you choose, avoid text with all uppercase letters, as these are hard to read. This time let's talk about color. For a slide to be easy to read, dark text on a light background works best. Avoid using contrasting colors because this combination will make everything look unclear. For example, avoid using purple and orange together, or red and In green. Also, be selective when you add graphic items, like bullets, numbers, boxes and arrows. These can be very distracting if you have too many variations. Choose just one or two of these items to use throughout your presentations. Most importantly, you want your design to be consistent. In other words, keep your font styles, sizes, and colors, as well as your graphic elements consistent on each slide. Remember, the slides are there to enhance your presentation, not confuse it. It's time to review. In this lesson we looked at how you can effectively include slides to enhance your presentations. First, organize your slides in three parts. One or two opening slides, content slides with visuals, and minimal text and the closing slide. Next, keep your text concise, parallel, and accurate. Choose the words you put on slides carefully, check every list for parallel structure, and proofread your spelling and capitalization thoroughly. Finally, keep your slides consistent, and your designs simple. Use a Sans Serif font, only two to three different sizes on a slide. Dark type on light backgrounds, and one or two graphic items. By following these guidelines, you can create powerful slides and powerful presentations. In our next lesson, we'll take a look at some grammar points that many international English users find very tricky. Articles and count and non-count nouns. I look forward to our next lesson. See you soon. [MUSIC]
