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Bullets Kill: 5 Reasons You Should Stop Filling Your Presentations With Bullets

FROM APPLICATIONS INSTRUCTOR DIANE NELSON

We've all seen them - presentations filled with slide after slide of bullet points. While bullet points can help organize your information, they can be deadly when it comes to creating memorable presentations that engage and entertain. Consider these reasons why graphics are great and bullets are boring:

Retention. Will your audience remember what you told them? To increase their retention use graphics in place of text filled bullet points. Your brain uses short-term memory to process words and only retains about seven bits of information at a time. Images are stored in long-term memory so your ideas will remain after your presentation is done.

Transmission. If you want your audience to grasp you message quickly, use visuals. People process visual information faster than text – about 60,000 times faster.

Comprehension. Want your audience to understand what you're saying? Studies have shown that visuals improve learning by up to 400 percent. Visuals allow the brain to synthesize large amounts of new information.

Emotion. Engage your audience better by using visuals in your presentation. Images trigger emotions; they cause faster and stronger reactions than words. An individual's emotional response to a picture forms memories - ones that also lead to retention.

Motivation. 60% of people are visual learners - they respond better to visual information than to text alone. Seeing a picture allows audience members to recreate the experience in their mind. If you want to capture their attention and get people excited about what you're saying, use visuals – not bullet points.

If you are interested in learning more about PowerPoint, check out our upcoming webinars, Getting Started With Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 (Beginner) and Getting Started With Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 (Intermediate)

Originally written by Diane Nelson

Categories: Microsoft Office

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