Ultimate Guide to Improving Your PowerPoint Presentation Writing Skills

Basically, experts say there are five rules of a killer PowerPoint presentation.

You need to become personal, ask various questions, use charts and graphs, add diagrams, and don’t forget about professional images. But these recommendations are pretty general and are more about the essence of the message rather than writing skills…

PowerPoint is a common tool used for writing slide shows. The program is commonly referred to as comparatively intuitive, informative, and engaging. How to improve your skills to create slides that are prominent and deliver a single message? The guide we’ve created has several steps.

1. Always consider the audience.
2. Learn visual hierarchy rules.
3. Work with animations.
4. Think of the Big Idea.
5. Follow the 5/5/5 rule.
6. Rely on grids.
7. Fade to blank if you’re talking.
8. Improve the images.
9. Add videos.
10. Make the title slide stand out.

Being a master in powerpoint presentations is a great addition to your professional arsenal, but if you are also looking to enhance that arsenal with other tools, you can check out some powerpoint alternatives.

For now, let’s see what tips each of them hides.

Step 1

Both your words and information presented on slides are to be tailored to the people you are delivering it to. Always take into account the audience you will be talking to. Be intentional as well as specific about everything they are going to hear and see, think of things that will make them get engaged in the process. The one, who uses the same presentation for different audiences, succeeds in delivering a message to one of them only, while dozens of others get lost in unknown terms and useless information. It is better to spend time rearranging slides than losing a chance to show yourself.

Step 2

Visual hierarchy is what the development of any PowerPoint project should start with. It deals with the element arrangement in a way to show the importance of the presentation. The theory is rather helpful in defining the slide structure so that it becomes eye-catching. The hierarchy is normally achieved via the use of contrasting colors that make the most essential elements stand out and via the text or image sizes.  

Visual hierarchy directly affects your audience's focus level, so you need to prepare your presentations accordingly. Here are the "Presentation Templates and PowerPoint Themes" to show you how to do just that.

Step 3

Did you know that PowerPoint has a great variety of built-in animations? Each and every one of them is available for free and helps make slides look better and deliver the data gradually, pointing out the most vital info. However, we suggest you forget about using too many tools for the same presentation as multiple effects may distract the audience. Choose two or three appropriate effects and apply them to most of the slides when needed.

Step 4

Why do we call it big? It’s because it must include one overarching message. This sort of idea is unbelievably important because it depicts your unique point of view and puts something at stake. Write the idea down, think over its main components that will definitely support it (elements like words, images, and audio). If some elements don’t bolster the core takeaway, they must be removed.

Step 5

Along with thinking over numerous details, it is essential to not make the audience overwhelmed with the amount of new information. That is why it is recommended to keep the text short and right to the point. This is what the 5/5/5 rule is about. It stands for using not more than five words per one text line, only five lines per slide and just five text-loaded slides.

Step 6

What are grids? They are the hidden slide structures arranged in horizontal or vertical lines and are meant to aid in creating presentations with well-balanced slides. Grids are useful when they include margins or slide borders that are free from graphics and words, gutters that are blank spaces to separate columns, and the latter ones are vertical sections for the actual content. You can set own grids to suit your data best.

Step 7

You are the main point of the entire presentation, not the slides. Fade to blank to draw the audience’s attention to you. Consider this is a close-up as in a good movie when the director makes a viewer pay attention to what is essential at this very moment.

Step 8

A good presentation is always more about images, not words. PowerPoint has brand new photo-editing capabilities that enhance the quality of photos when needed. Press ‘Picture Tool – Format’ and get the options: convert colors, crop, focus, shape, remove the background.

Step 9

Yes, inserting videos to your PP presentation is vital. Some speakers choose to import a video of them talking while a demo is shown in their slides. In this case, the video is posted on the screen’s corner while the slides are playing. Just press ‘Record’ to record the screen as you’re demonstrating something important. The program will record you talking and showing.

Step 10

Believe it or not, you need to have a title slide that stands out whether you use it as a  marketing asset for social media, email and other channels or not. Spend time to think over the design and create a really visually engaging title page that draws people in from the very start of your presentation.

Writing and designing great slides is the same as creating amazing content. You need to make your PowerPoint presentation easy-to-digest and appealing so that people would get excited while sitting through it. Limit the use of prose, add simplicity to illustrations and the message, don’t forget about audio and video, and have a clear objective to create something really worthy.  If you are too busy for making your own presentation and you need assistance from expert writers, contact an academic writing service where you can easily buy professional PowerPoint presentations online.

Featured Image by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash