by Wai Heng Kelvin Lee

Created on: February 16, 2009

When you are giving a presentation, do you cram your slides with bullet-points containing substantial information? You may just be providing the environment to send your audience to sleep!

You may even have experienced sleepiness in a presentation before. But is there a way to keep ourselves from creating the environment that causes such drowsiness?

Yes, there is!

But first, we have to know how the brain functions when processing information.

Our brain consists of two parts the left brain and the right brain.

When our slides are filled with textual information, the left brain has to process all this information, since it is concerned with processing logical thinking and calculations. Because energy is needed to process the large amount of information on the screen, the audience may become drowsy soon enough.

The art to keeping your audience alert and awake comes from engaging both parts of the brain. At present, typical PowerPoint slides have failed to consider the need to engage the right brain to a large extent.

The solution to engaging the right brain is to insert as many graphic elements as you can into your slides, since they will encourage thinking involved with aesthetics, feelings and creativity, which is what the right brain processes.

The MTV and YouTube generation are most likely to be occupying themselves with videos and sound rather than words in books, because these sources of entertainment engage their emotions and therefore, their right brains.

By connecting with the emotions, mental barriers can be surpassed so that the message is conveyed with greater impact. So how do we apply this to our PowerPoint presentations?

Just connect yourself to the internet, and you will be able to find royalty-free images going for as low as US$1 on websites such as www.BigStockPhoto.com and www.Dreamtimes.com.

These images outdo those pixilated images you may copy off others' websites, because they are of fine quality and can be reused over and over again. You are free to do whatever you want with the photos except resell them once you have downloaded them.

As an example on the importance of using visuals, let's look at the Oscar winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

This documentary was actually based on presentations made by Al Gore, an established environmentalist, to bring the message of climate change to the masses. Before Duarte Designs repackaged the presentation, people did not take much notice. But after the documentary had been made, it got so much attention that it even won an Oscar.

And that's what images and videos can help you do. Perhaps they will not win you an Oscar, but they will make your audience listen.

So put in meaningful and impactful images into your slides to appeal to your audience's emotions and imagination! These will provide the extra element to help you communicate your message effectively.

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