Rob Ashton
I found myself in a strange situation recently – I was approaching a long Zoom call with genuine excitement.
It was a webinar by an expert I’d just started following on social media and I was very keen to hear more of what he had to say.
He started well, drawing me in with a short, engaging anecdote in the warm, friendly voice I instantly recognised from his podcast.
Sadly, it all went south when he shared his first slide.
Within five minutes, I was confused and disengaged. Five minutes more saw me checked out and heading back to my inbox.
So what went wrong?
See it, read it
The problem was that, as I tried to read what was on it, he continued talking. So I kept having to switch my attention between what he’d written and what he was saying.
The result was that I understood neither. And I soon found myself hopelessly lost.
Regular Writing Matters readers will know that reading is not a natural process. Just learning to do it involves completely rewiring our own brain. And it takes ten years before it feels like second nature.
But there’s another quirk of reading that I haven’t mentioned yet: once we can read, we simply can’t avoid doing it.
We’ll automatically try to read any text that’s put before us. And it’s one of the biggest reasons that so many presentations fail.
If we see it, we read it.
That doesn’t mean we’ll understand it, though. In fact, it might completely baffle us. (Understanding often takes a lot more effort, especially if it’s written in Documentese.)
Information overload
But our brain will still start to process and interpret words as soon as we see them. And when we’re doing that, we find it incredibly difficult to do or understand anything else.
You’ll know this if you’ve ever had to stop walking in order to understand an email on your phone.
It’s called the Stroop effect, after the psychologist who first noted it. In his study, Stroop found that volunteers struggled to name the colour of a font if the meaning of the word didn’t match. Like this:
RED
ORANGE
GREEN
That was way back in 1935. So really, you’d think we’d know better by now. Yet this has a bigger impact today than it’s ever had.
Totally lost
Just imagine …
A colleague is presenting their monthly report or the results of the project they’ve been working on.
Then they put up a slide of ten bullet points.
You might be interested. You might really want to understand what they’re telling you. But instead you stop listening to them and start reading.
You just can’t help it.
Then you catch yourself, and you try to start listening to them again. But then, of course, you struggle to read the slide properly. You can’t do both at the same time.
And within minutes, you’ll be just as lost as I was.
Fix the reading gap
If you put words up on a screen, you can be sure of one thing: your audience will read them. They just won’t be able to help themselves.
To get around this, try displaying only one bullet or sentence at a time, or using images instead of text. And never display whole passages or multiple sentences unless you want your audience to read them.
Above all else, if you display text on a screen: stop talking.
For more help, check out Jack Elliott’s complete guide to writing presentations.
And this graphical guide explains why it’s so easy to overload readers (and how to avoid doing that).
Image credit: Dan Meyers / Unsplash
