I am watching a lot of tutorial and training videos at the moment, and many of them make the same mistake as the presenter who reads out bullet points.

Usually the introduction of a 10 minute video is an overview slide with 4 lines explaining what the course is going to cover. You read it in exactly 5 seconds, but the video narrator talks and talks and talks around the bullets for ever. Usually somewhere in the comments below is someone who posts a link with a time stamp and says "the real stuff starts here", followed by lots of thank you's from other viewers.

Videos are usually not very well scripted, an instructor just talks around the subject (in my case computer code that is edited "live" on the screen). But sometimes, some visual structure can be useful. For example, discussing pros and cons of multiple approaches to a problem, different software solutions, etc. These subjects are usually discussed in a conversational style where the viewer is losing the overall picture at some stage. It is better in this case to put in a very clear overview table where all the options are compared side by side.

For both these scenarios, you could ask your video audience to simply pause the video, asking them to read what is on the screen and press play again when they are done. Now, you can go through this video slide more as a voice over, providing additional comments, rather than feeling the need to read out the content.


Cover image by Bethany Legg on Unsplash

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