This is the real reason why too much text on slides doesn't work
We keep preaching that too much text on slides is an absolute no-go. After all, it's not only visually unappealing, it also distracts far too much from the actual presentation. But what the real reason for this is, we reveal in the following blog post including demonstration video to experience directly and try out for yourself!
You've probably experienced this before: You're sitting in the audience, a presentation starts and within a few minutes you can't follow it anymore. One of the most common reasons - besides a yawningly long or unnaturally fast way of speaking - is that the slides are overloaded with a veritable flood of text. So you have to make a direct decision: Do you prefer to listen to the presenter, or start reading the slide text? For fear of missing something, we tend to start reading immediately. Consequently, however, we can no longer follow the spoken word. But why is that?
The answer is simple: with too much text on slides, the audience is not only confronted with a visual overload, but above all with an auditory overload. This means that on the one hand we hear how the sepaker speaks and on the other hand our inner voice, which reads the slide text to us, fights against it. Unfortunately, this kind of multitasking is not possible, because the brain cannot process two auditory impulses at the same time. And that's also the real reason why too much text on slides just doesn't work.
So that you can see for yourself directly, we have created a demonstration video for you. Click in and try to follow presono CEO Martin Behrens while reading the text on his slide. You will be surprised!
In this situation, a lot of text on slides works
The situation is different, of course, if you send your presentations and slides purely virtually as a source of information. After company presentations or sales pitches, for example, it is advisable to make the discussed content available to the discussion partners. With presono you have the possibility to provide more detailed information by means of links and overlays. This way, all necessary information is stored in your slides, whereby they do not cause unnecessary distraction during your live appointment, but can be clicked on and presented directly upon request. In addition, you can not only send the presentation you have given to your discussion partners via an interactive link, but also evaluate the individual click behavior of the recipients afterwards.