Presentation Skills Guide

Equipped With Agency — Workshop Series The delivery counterpart to EWA_Slide_Design_Guide.pdf. That guide governs how a slide looks. This one governs how a deck is staged and delivered — what appears when, in what order, at what pace, and what a person in the third row actually takes away.

Written because the decks were built to a design standard and never to a presentation standard, and those are different things. A slide can pass every contrast, type-scale and margin check in the system and still put seven points in front of a room at once while the facilitator talks about the first.

0. The short version

If you read nothing else:

1. The headline should be the point, not the topic. This is the single best-evidenced finding in presentation research and the one this series currently gets wrong most often.
2. Reveal multi-point slides one point at a time — but know that the evidence for this is weaker than it feels, and that it must never gate anything a person in distress needs.
3. Never read your slide aloud. Reading text the audience is simultaneously reading measurably hurts comprehension. Say the ten sentences the headline summarises.
4. The safety slide is never staged, never animated, never behind a click. Crisis numbers appear instantly and completely or the design is wrong.
5. 1–2 minutes per slide, 120–150 words per minute. A 90-minute session is not 60 slides.

1. What the evidence actually says

Sourced, because this series does not assert from memory.

1a. Sentence headlines beat topic headlines — the strongest finding here

Alley and Garner (Penn State) compared 110 engineering students viewing the same technical content in two slide formats. The assertion–evidence format uses "a sentence headline that makes explicit the main message or assertion" supported by visual evidence. The common-practice format uses a phrase headline over a bullet list.

The assertion–evidence group showed "superior comprehension and fewer misconceptions… as well as lower perceived cognitive load," and "stronger recall… at delayed post-test."

The paper anticipates the obvious objection — that a sentence headline duplicates what the presenter says — and answers it directly: "this sentence is a single-sentence summary of the slide that reinforces, on average, ten spoken sentences." One sentence summarising ten is not redundancy; it is signalling.

What this means here: a headline that says "The Body Reset" tells the room the topic. A headline that says "My body is giving me information, not a verdict" tells them the point. Both strings already exist on that slide. See §3.

1b. Mayer's multimedia principles — the four that bite

1c. Animation: the evidence is mixed, and that matters

This is where most presentation advice overclaims. Miller and James tested PowerPoint with and without animation that progressively presented text and revealed parts of figures. Students reported the animated versions were more effective. Their exam scores did not improve.

The general finding across this literature is that progressive disclosure helps manage attention but does not automatically improve learning — it depends entirely on whether the staging matches the structure of the content.

So the rule here is narrow. Build a slide only where the content is genuinely sequential and the room is meant to act on each step in turn. Do not build a slide because it looks more polished. A seven-step protocol you are walking the room through is the good case. A three-point concept slide is usually not.

1d. Motion and accessibility

WCAG 2.2 success criterion 2.3.3 Animation from Interactions (Level AAA): "Motion animation triggered by interaction can be disabled, unless the animation is essential to the functionality or the information being conveyed."

It exists to protect people with vestibular disorders, for whom unnecessary motion can cause dizziness, nausea, migraine and in some cases days of recovery. A regulation-skills group is precisely the room where somebody may be managing exactly that.

Practical consequence: entrance effects only, no motion paths, no spins, no zooms, no fly-ins that travel across the slide. Appear and Fade do not move anything across the visual field. Everything else is off the table in this series, and that is a floor rather than a preference.

1e. Microsoft's own accessibility rules for PowerPoint

From Microsoft's published guidance:

• "Give every slide a unique title." Screen-reader users navigate by scanning the title list.
• Reading order — screen readers read shapes in the order they were added, not the order they appear. Microsoft's instruction is to use the Reading Order pane so "the reading order is the same for people who see and people who use technology such as screen readers."
• Alt text on all visuals, "concise and unambiguous," a sentence or two, without "a graphic of" or "an image of."
• Sans-serif at 18pt or larger; avoid all-capitals and heavy italics or underlines.
• Avoid tables where the data can be presented another way, because screen readers track position by counting cells.
• Run the Accessibility Checker before shipping.

1f. Animation craft, where the practitioner guidance is consistent

• One or two animation styles per deck, not a catalogue.
• Prefer the plain ones — Appear, Fade, Wipe.
• Effects should run under one second; certainly under three.
• Use an effect only if it "helps tell the story, guides the viewer, or adds emphasis." Otherwise leave it off.

1g. Pace

• 120–150 words per minute is where audiences comprehend and retain best. Slow to ~100–120 for the points that matter; a little faster on transitions to signal movement.
• 1–2 minutes per slide as a working figure.
• Rehearse out loud, standing or seated as you will actually deliver. Silent rehearsal does not find the sentences that do not work in a mouth.

2. The rules for this series

Derived from the above, not copied from it. Where this series departs from general advice, the reason is stated.

R1 — The headline carries the assertion

Every content slide's headline should be the claim, not the subject. If the slide has a memorable line somewhere on it, that line is almost certainly the headline and the current headline is almost certainly the label.

Exception, and it is a real one: a protocol needs a name people can refer back to — "run the Body Reset" is an instruction a participant can act on weeks later; "run the my-body-is-giving-me-information one" is not. So the protocol name does not disappear. It moves to the label slot, which currently carries near-contentless words like "THE SEQUENCE".

R2 — Build only genuinely sequential content

Protocol steps: build. The room is meant to do step 1 before hearing step 7.

Concept bullets, comparison tables, workbook pages, diagrams: no build. They are structures to be seen whole, and segmenting them fights the content instead of serving it.

R3 — Entrance effects only, and only two of them

Appear for steps, Fade for anything that needs softening. Nothing that moves across the visual field (§1d). Under one second. No transitions between slides at all — a deck that pushes and wipes between slides is asserting an energy this material does not have.

R4 — The safety slide is never staged

No build, no animation, no transition, no click. Crisis numbers appear whole, instantly, every time. The same rule applies to any slide carrying a phone number or a route to help.

This is the one rule in this document with no exception and no discretion. A facilitator who is mid-crisis in a room must not have to remember which click reveals 9-8-8.

R5 — Every build must degrade to nothing

The PDF is the artefact that travels: it goes in every package, it is what gets emailed, and it is what a host reads before saying yes. A slide whose meaning depends on its build order is broken in PDF.

So builds add pacing, never information. Every slide must be complete and correct when every element is visible at once — which is exactly what the PDF shows. Test this by looking at the PDF, not by imagining it.

R6 — Position in the deck is printed, not animated

Wayfinding — where am I, how much is left — has to survive PDF too, and cannot be a progress bar that only exists in slideshow mode. Whatever is used must be on the slide.

R7 — Do not read the slide

The redundancy principle (§1b) is not a style note. Reading text aloud while the room reads the same text measurably hurts comprehension. The headline exists to summarise; the ten sentences are yours.

The facilitator guides already carry those sentences in the speaker notes. Use them.

R8 — Unique slide titles, correct reading order, alt text on every visual

Microsoft's rules, adopted directly (§1e). Two are already satisfied — every picture carries alt text, and the type floor is 20pt against Microsoft's 18. Unique titles and reading order need checking.

3. Where the decks stand — audited, not assumed

Every number below is measured rather than typed, and re-measured on each build. A hand-typed count is true on the day it is typed. Measured across the 16 built portfolio decks, 497 slides.

Two figures are reported for R1, and they legitimately disagree. Protocol slides are remapped when they are rendered — the assertion becomes the headline and the protocol name moves into the label — so a deck can be specified as "The Body Reset" and lead, on screen, with "My body is giving me information, not a verdict." The rendered figure is what a room sees and is the score. The spec figure is the worklist.

What the remaining 277 topic headlines are. Almost all are concept and workbook slides, whose archetypes do not remap. One evidence slide has an assertion available. Whether to promote those is a separate decision from the protocol case — there the assertion already existed and was merely printed last. Promoting a headline you have to write is authorship, not a layout pass.

The finding that matters: every one of the 52 protocol slides already carries a full-sentence assertion — and prints it at the bottom, small, in italic teal, after the steps. The research says that sentence belongs at the top in the headline position.

Three real examples, exactly as they currently render:

The sentence that Alley's 110 students remembered better, understood better and reported as less cognitively demanding is present on all 52 slides, in the smallest type on the slide, below the fold of attention.

Resolved: the assertion was promoted. All 52 protocol slides now read

The protocol name stays as the retrieval handle — "run the Body Reset" is an instruction somebody can act on weeks later — and moves into the label, alongside when to reach for it. The base line is gone rather than moved: reading the point first and last is the redundancy the coherence principle warns about, and the steps needed the freed inch more than the slide needed a reprise.

The slide's screen-reader title improved as a side effect. "My body is giving me information, not a verdict." is a far more navigable title than "The Body Reset", which means nothing outside the room.

4. Staging a deck — the working method

1. Write the assertion first. If you cannot state the slide's point in one sentence, the slide does not have one yet, and no amount of staging will supply it.
2. Decide whether the content is sequential. If not, no build (R2).
3. Stage the sequence, one click per step. Appear, under one second, in reading order.
4. Look at the PDF. If it does not read correctly with everything visible, the build is carrying information and R5 is broken.
5. Run the Accessibility Checker, then the Reading Order pane.
6. Rehearse out loud at the pace you will actually use, with the speaker notes, seated as you will sit.

5. Delivering it in the room

This section is about the person, not the file, and it is where most of the value is.

• Sit. §8 of the handbook is not a concession, it is the design.
• Talk to the room, not the screen. If you find yourself turning to read, the slide has too many words — note it and fix the slide, not your neck.
• Hold a gaze for three to five seconds, finish the thought, move to another person. Rotate.
• Silence after a build is not dead air. Click, stop talking, let them read the one line. Two seconds feels like ten to you and like nothing to them.
• Never advance past a slide somebody is still writing from. Ask.
• The close is protected (fidelity C6). If you are behind, cut the middle, never the end.
• If someone discloses, the deck stops entirely. Handbook §4. There is no slide worth finishing.

6. What this guide does not cover

• Whether the content is any good. Staging a weak slide well produces a well-staged weak slide.
• Virtual delivery mechanics — screen share, breakouts. Handbook §9 covers the safety consequences, which matter more.
• Anything requiring a licence, a plugin or a font you do not have. Every rule above is achievable in the file as it stands.

Sources

• Alley, M. & Garner, J. — How the Design of Presentation Slides Affects Audience Comprehension: A Case for the Assertion–Evidence Approach, Penn State. 110 students; superior comprehension, fewer misconceptions, lower perceived cognitive load, stronger delayed recall.
• Mayer, R. — Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning: signalling, segmenting, redundancy, coherence.
• Miller & James — PowerPoint animation in introductory astronomy: students reported animated versions as more effective; exam scores did not increase.
• W3C — WCAG 2.2 Understanding SC 2.3.3, Animation from Interactions (Level AAA), and the vestibular guidance within it.
• Microsoft — Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities.
• Bandura, A. (2006) — used elsewhere in this series for the outcome measure, not for slide design.

Will Theory · © William D. Hannam. All rights reserved.