Saturday, October 20, 2012

Less is More

I think that the biggest thing that I gleaned overall from the Speech Buddy Videos was the importance of simplicity in visual media that accompanies your speech.  There is a tendency to want to convey as much information as possible to your audience, which can have a negative impact when you clutter slides with too many images or words.  I also took note in the video that showed a girl giving a presentation about Sikh culture of the point that was made when she put five images on one slide and none of them stood out or could be clearly seen.  On the video they said that it would have been better for her to use five individual slides to show each element.  My upcoming speech is too short to show numerous slides, but I did think it was important that if there are specific things that I want to give a visual aid for I should not try to cram them all on to one slide.  If anything it would be better to choose which image is the most helpful to my audience or most key to my speech and discard the other images altogether.  When giving a speech you always want to be concise and not add superfluous information that is going to confuse your audience or make them lose sight of the main elements of your speech.  The same is true for any visual media that you use to accompany your speech.  It should emphasize your main points, not add new and possibly unnecessary information.

"I'll know my song well before I start singing." -Bob Dylan

1 comment:

  1. I agree that a lot of people tend to over complicate their media presentations. It can be easy to have too much information on the slides. I have seen many speeches with way too much text on them. As a member of the audience, I find this to be really distracting. Instead of listening to the speech, I am reading all the text on the slides. The same is true for pictures. One big picture, or two medium pictures is much better than five small pictures. The pictures are too small for the audience to see, and with that many pictures, the slide becomes very cluttered. It is hard for the people in the audience to get a good view of the pictures.

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