I hated electrical theory – it was the hardest-earned B- of my college career. But one concept stuck with me, the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N). It’s a simple concept, which might explain why it’s the only thing I remember from that course. If you’re listening to a baseball game on a stormy night as you drive out of town, the signal is the announcer, the crack of the bat, and the crowd cheering; the noise is the crackle from the lightning and the static from the fading radio waves. Naturally, we want the signal to be high and the noise to be low. The signal is communicating, and the noise is irritating!
Noise is Everywhere in Presentations
There are two types of noise in presentations – audible and visual. Audible noise includes the presenter’s ums and ahs, the audience members’ coughs and fidgets, and the environment’s ticking clocks and jackhammers outside the room. Visual noise includes backgrounds and gridlines in graphs, shadows and fade effects on shapes, inconsistent fonts and extra spaces in text, poorly distributed and aligned objects, and “look how artsy I am” templates. Anything that doesn’t communicate information gets in the way of the audience receiving that signal.
Noise Causes Stress
Just like a cluttered room causes stress, a cluttered (noisy) presentation causes stress.
At home, clutter:
- Bombards our minds with stimuli, causing senses to work overtime on unimportant stimuli
- Distracts us by drawing our attention away from where our focus should be
- Makes it more difficult to relax
- Makes us anxious because we’re never sure when we’ll get to the bottom of the pile
- Invades the open spaces that allow most people to think, brainstorm, and problem solve
- Frustrates us by preventing us from locating what we need
In a presentation, clutter:
- Overstimulates your audience and makes it hard to keep up
- Draws attention to less important information, leading to rabbit-hole discussions
- Requires more mental effort to consume
- Makes presentations seem like they will never end
- Encourages your audience to tune out rather than wade through your content
- Makes it harder to find key pieces of information later
Make it Stop – How to Reduce Noise
Think about how your body physically reacts when you hear fingers on a chalkboard. That’s how your audience may be reacting to your noisy presentations. Here’s how to take the noise out of your presentations:
- Leverage a standard template. Well-made templates make it easy to create consistent slides with compatible colors and your titles in the same place. For more on this topic, see What Amtrak Can Teach Us About Presentation Standards.
- Use a simple, elegant design. If you took this advice to the extreme, you would use the simplest slide design possible, a white background with no logo and no design elements. I would endorse this approach except for one thing. What that template might communicate is that you are unprofessional or lack style. A plain-white template is like a wardrobe that consists only of khakis and blue dress shirts. It makes it easy to get dressed for work, but you won’t win any style points.
- Write the fewest words required to make your point. If you write one more word than necessary, you are cluttering your slides and wasting your audience’s time. No one writes concisely the first time. And I don’t encourage you to write concisely when building your slides – it slows you down too much. That means you must learn how to word diet when editing. To word diet effectively, scrutinize every word and phrase and ask two questions:
- Do I need this to communicate my point? If not, delete it.
- Can I make this point with fewer words? If yes, rewrite it. Don’t say, “in the not too distant future,” when you can say, “soon.”
- Use professional grammar & style. Typos and grammar issues are like landmines for your audience. Have too many issues, and your audience will judge you. Even if you aced your middle school grammar tests, recruit someone who is an excellent proofreader to find your mistakes.
Having someone else proofread your work is critical for finding and fixing all noise problems. I do this for a living and I don’t publish or present anything without having my wife or daughter proofread. And they always find something that can be improved…which is kind of irritating!