Week 06 · lesson

A Slide Has One Job

A slide should help an audience understand the point you are making right now. It is not a storage container for every sentence you researched.

If a slide contains an essay, the audience has to choose between reading the essay and listening to the presenter. That is usually a design failure, not evidence of thoroughness.

Separate the visual layer from the spoken layer

A useful presentation has at least two channels:

SLIDE
visual evidence + key language
        ↕
PRESENTER
context + explanation + transition

Speaker notes can support the presenter without forcing every detail onto the slide.

Build a five-part story

For the Week 6 assignment, the sequence is deliberately constrained:

Problem — what needs understanding?
Evidence — what fact, observation, image, or chart matters?
Explanation — how does the mechanism work?
Solution — what action or response follows?
Takeaway — what should the audience remember?

That sequence will not fit every presentation in the world. It is a useful constraint for learning to prioritize.

Worked repair: the paragraph slide

Original fictional slide:

Cloud storage is a technology that allows people to save files on remote servers and access those files through an internet-connected device, which is useful for collaboration because people can share files with other people and edit them from different devices but they also need to think about permissions and internet access and accounts...

A stronger slide might show:

Cloud file ≠ local copy

DEVICE → INTERNET → CLOUD FILE
                ↘ shared permission

Speaker notes then explain ownership, access, and the limitation that network/account access matters.

The concept did not become simpler. The distribution of information improved.

Create a Five-Slide Storyboard

Choose a course-safe technology concept. Before opening Slides, sketch five boxes labeled Problem, Evidence, Explanation, Solution, Takeaway.

For each box, record:

one sentence the audience must understand;
the visual/evidence needed;
what belongs in speaker notes instead of on-screen text.

Failure mode: one slide doing four jobs

If a slide introduces a problem, explains the mechanism, lists six solutions, and includes the final conclusion, it has no clear visual priority. Split the reasoning across the story sequence.

Evidence

Submit the Five-Slide Storyboard. It should be understandable before a theme, animation, or image is chosen.

Design begins with the communication job. Decoration comes later.