A Simple Framework for prepping presentations

20241215.1 - a super simple presentation framework

There are many different types of presentation templates and formats; however, this one is my method for preparing a presentation that you intend on presenting to people in person or online.

In terms of structure, I tend to follow a top-down model, going from the bigger picture down to the specifics. However, most importantly, I start with the title headings of each slide. I try to craft a story in short sentences, each representing a slide heading. Essentially, if you stacked all the slide headings together, you would get a poem or an article about the topic you're presenting on, with a very nice story. I would then use the images within the individual slides to illustrate and support the particular sentence that I'm trying to convey. This allows us to have one particular point per slide; however, the images act as prompts so that if you're presenting and you wish to deviate and tell side stories, the images allow you to do so.

Here’s an example from a presentation i did about my career, you can see each of these sentences works individually, but also together as a narrative.

By using this kind of sentence structure, you can then enhance it by using certain oratory techniques such as antistrophe (repetition of words at the end of successive phrases), antithesis (the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases), and antimetabole (the repetition of words in successive clauses, but with their order transposed).

Due to the sentence structure, this acts as a prompt allowing you to flow through the following slides. It also limits the amount of time you spend on each slide so you can deliberately choose to dwell or move on from an individual slide, which helps with pacing and timing.

here you can see how the images support the header sentence, but also act as prompts for other specific stories i could elaborate on, which support the point made in the header.

Finally, the sentence structure allows you to summarise the key point that you want the reader to take away.