Lydia Bates
My friend Lydia is a copywriter and general wordsmith (and does a cool training course on writing for the web). As part of that course she uses the acronym SCAMP to help people remember how to write online: it’s so useful for that that I reproduce it here (with comments of my own) with reference to slides and presentations.
Lydia’s original comments are as quotes below (she was writing in a bullet-point list at the time!)
Simple – avoid jargon or sales patter, keep words easy to understand
Oh, if only people who wrote presentations and slides in particular would keep to this advice! Trying to keep this kind of stuff out of your presentation when you write it is tricky because if you try and censor yourself as you write you’ll inevitably reduce the flow of your writing and end up cramping your style.
What I suggest instead is to design your presentation as you would normally, then take a break to get your mind clear; come back to what you’ve designed and written with a clear head and cut/edit everything that’s not simple and clear. It takes longer at first but it means your presentation is much, much better written.
Concise – about half as many words as you would use in print
This is almost irrelevant for slides, where there should be almost no words at all, of course, but you get the idea! Less is more. Almost always. As someone said “Make sure you stop talking before your audience stops listening”! (Sorry, for the life of me, Google can’t find who said that originally!). Ask yourself, how long would you be able to concentrate for… not listen… concentrate… then plan your presentation to finish in just less time than that!
Active – eg ‘Mr A did action B’ rather than ‘action B was done by Mr A’
This is just plain obvious, isn’t it! Active stuff is much easier to listen to!
Meaningful – edit out any padding that doesn’t actual mean anything
Again, this is best done using the two-step strategy. Write, refresh yourself, then edit! The problem for expert presenters is that they know too much and find it hard to decide what’s meaningful. Well of course they don’t! What they find difficult is to figure out what’s meaningful to their audience at that time, in that place.
Positive – eg ‘we do this’ rather than ‘we don’t do that’
Again this is just easier to listen to and easier to act on. Obviously there are some exceptions. “In case of fire do not use the lifts” makes more sense than “In case of fire do use the stairs” but as a general principle, it takes some beating. The key to a good presentation is that it changes something – usually the way members of the audience behave by the end of the presentation – giving them something to do rather than something to not do makes a lot of sense in that context!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting this is ‘the answer’ any more than anything else I’ve ever cited in this blog, but it’s a nice start!
