Anaylisis of Carnegie Communications PPT Presentation

Just from taking public presentation here at Lynchburg College, I was able to immediately recognize that Carnegie did a poor job with their PPT slide show and presentation. The speaker relied too heavily on the use of text in her slide shows, and I even saw her having to look back at her slides to see where she was in her speech. This is poor presentation skills; not to mention it is very distracting to have a million lines of text thrown up on a screen. As such, the audience ends up staring at the slide show during the whole presentation rather than looking at the speaker.

Not all information needed to be put up on the slide shows, and I felt that the speaker should have relied more on the use of black blank screens so that we would be focusing on the speaker rather than the screen. Their were a couple of instances where Carnegie used text graphics to present information and this was very effective. As I have learned from my public presentation class, audiences lose attention very quickly if text heavy screens are the dominant part of a speech; therefore, using graphics in presenting information works with your audience to trigger that information in a visual message - which results in the audience more likely to remember aspects of a speech.

These tricks will be easier to employ in our English 210 PPT presentations because the nature of the assignment requires us to use lots of graphics and images. As a result I am confident that I will be able to create an effective power point presentation to lure high school students into wanting to pursue English as a major or minor at Lynchburg College.