Fact. Everyone of us in business has to write a presentation now and then. We may not love doing it. We may not do it often. But sooner or later, whether we’re presenting at a conference or writing a pitch presentation, we have to fire up powerpoint or keynote and start hitting those bullet points.
But writing presentations doesn’t have to be hard work. We can easily turn the process of creating slides into a skill that’s done quickly and is great for our careers.
In this post we’ll look at 5 steps to writing presentations like a pro. And here’s the surprise, most of these steps don’t require any presentation software whatsoever.
Instead we use a technique known as ‘wireframing’. Isn’t wireframing for building websites? Exactly!
First…A Bit About Wireframing
‘Wireframing’ has been an essential method for web designers of many years. Wireframes are black and white representations of a webpage that show how content will be laid out to fulfill the page’s purpose. In another post I wrote about wireframing for product design. The advantage of this technique is it allows designers to build a concept before starting any visual design. It’s a minimum fuss option that is extremely quick. This is why the same method is excellent for creating presentations.
#1 Sketch Your Presentation Slides….Go
The first step in writing your presentation is to grab a pile of A4 sheets. Now for each sheet, write a heading that will represent the title of your slide. Once you’ve done that, add the individual components that you feel will go on the each slide – whether that’s text, or a graph, or an image, or a headline. Once you have done one slide, start on another. Keep it quick at this stage. The idea is to map out all of the slides you will need for your whole presentation before jumping into too much detail on any specific page. You will know when you’re done because you’ll feel like you have all your ideas on paper, and it’s difficult to create new slides for your topic.
#2 Order The Story of Your Presentation
Now take all of the sheets that you just wrote and put them into an order that represents your presentation. Here I find it helps to read the headings, just to get a sense for the flow of the presentation. If it feels clunky in places, I may reorder some of the slides, to make the flow more fluid. Sometimes I remove slides altogether. Or if I feel an important message is missing, I’ll add a new sheet of paper to represent a new slide.
#3 Add Detail and Shading
When you’re happy with the overall flow of the presentation, then it’s time to add texture. Here you can dive more deeply into the individual sheets, and add specific notes that will be ‘thought triggers’ for when you use a tool like PowerPoint to write the actual presentation. This step is all about refining the message of your presentation and adding depth to the content mapped out on individual pages. Now here’s a tip I use all the time…add shading. I know, it seems simple. But shading brings the page to life, giving it 3 dimensions, and makes it feel like a slide before you turn it into one. There’s something careful and deliberate about adding this detail to a page as part of one’s creative process.
#4 Tell The Story Out Loud
Now you’re pretty much there. You have the structure. You have the story. You can put your pen down for a minute. All that is left to do is to say the story out loud. Even if you are writing a presentation that you may not actually present (ie. it may be a briefing document to send to people), by saying the story page after page you can triple-check the flow of the material. This is the opportunity to fine tune the presentation before the final production.
#5. Write the Presentation
This is where 95% of people actually start the presentation. And I certainly used to start here. I would sit at the computer, fire up the software, and start typing into those text boxes. Often I did this before I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to say. Before long I would have a stack of slides, but switching them around didn’t really help me get to the heart of the message. Does any of this sound or feel familiar? The challenge I found was that, for me, presentation software is a great ‘authoring tool’, but it’s not necessarily a great ‘crafting tool’.
Now when I sketch wireframes of the slides, I do 90% of the crafting on paper – and do it very quickly. Then when I actually have to write slides by using the software, I’m very clear on what I need to do. This has save me loads of time and improves the quality of the final presentation.
You could use this technique whether you’re creating something highly visual like How Google Works through to an in-depth analysis like Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2015.
Here is an example of three final slides that resulted from the process above.
I hope in reading this post you found these suggestions useful. If you have any feedback or would like to share methods you use, I invite you to leave a comment below.
