[Tutorial] Dealing with quotes

Generally I recommend that you keep text to a minimum on your slides, but sometimes you can use text – even long text – to good advantage. Specifically, when you want to quote someone or some document.

Quotes come in handy in several situations:

• When you want to appeal to some authority to support your argument or set the stage
• When you have a requirement that you need to satisfy and you want to make it clear that you are responding to the requirement
• When you want to avoid any suggestion that you are taking something out of context

Now, usually when you throw up text your audience turns you off while they read the text. And, having read the text, they usually find that the speaker is reading the text out loud. And usually the audience will try to “read ahead” and figure out what you are going to say next. If you are lucky, everything is clear and they simply grow bored while you make your case. If you are unlucky, things are confusing and they turn you off completely while they try to make sense of it all. Either way, though, you’ve lost the audience.

The way to avoid this is to keep the audience from reading everything, and thus keep them focused on you. The way to do this is using emphasis. Consider the following example:

This is a very boring slide – it says so at the top. And the text itself is not particularly shocking. So what can we do to spice it up?

The first step is to find the words – ideally just a handful – that captures the essence of the point you want to make. Then we try to emphasize those words above the rest. Easy so far. But how do you emphasize the words?

One way is simply to take the words and make them bold. This is what it can look like:

Now, you can see the emphasized text, but just barely. I find that a simple bolding rarely words, but your mileage may vary. Let’s try to spice it up a bit more – let us add an underline:

Now this is better – the combination of bold and underline really brings out the emphasized words, and you can read the essence: “Text boring. Fix them. Add emphasis.” This is what your audience wil l read, and then they will focus back on you. And – as an added bonus – because you have emphasized these words, you are less likely to read the whole quote (hint: never read the whole quote – your audience can read faster than you can speak).

So – can we do better? Yes. Let us first step back and – instead of underlining – let us add some color:

This looks really good – at least I think so – but let us take it that final step. First, let us lose that stupid header – most slides really do not need a header. Then, let us add a relevant picture – say of the devestatingly handsome man who we are quoting:

There we go – color, emphasis, and relevant graphic. This will help you keep the audience interested and focused on you. Try it next time you are tempted to use a long quote.