Careful with your words

Space on presentation slides is scarce, and you need to think twice about every word you put down.

• More text takes longer to read
• Text blocks are as important as shapes in setting the layout of your slide
  • More text makes the slide look cluttered and busy
  • More text can create visual imbalances: some boxes have lots of text others not, some boxes have 2 lines of text, others just one, etc.

So what to do? Some of these are so obvious and basic, but hard to forget in the middle of the night before the deadline:

• Use short words... Yes as simple as that: "rationalise operational infrastructure" vs. "cut costs". Long words take up lots of space and hyphenation looks ugly.
• Rely on mental short cuts that the audience already has: "non-organic growth strategies and portfolio restructuring" can be replaced by "M&A"
• Eliminate words that do not add anything to a sentence (buzzwords, filler words), or repeat what has been said before, (hey I am doing it myself here).
• Regroup things. Box one: "Improve the basics: operations, purchasing, pricing", box two: "Enter the US market with product [X]", instead of 4 boxes with uneven content. 

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Cover image by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash