I love quotes. Bartlett’s Quotes used to be one of my favorite books in high school. And after all, “It’s better to be quotable than it is to be honest.” (Tom Stoppard.)
Quotes in a presentation, used judiciously, are a powerful technique as they ideally force the presenter to expound upon the point being made and not present a “see-say” slide. Additionally, the point you are trying to make has probably been made before far more succinctly and poetically and by someone far more famous than than you anyway. And finally, a quote if far more likely to stick in your audience’s mind as a summation of your point or even your whole talk.
I’ve got three rules for quotes:
Short
Memorable
Appropriate imagery
1. SHORT
You want your quote to get to the point, to be quickly readable and to be memorable. Those things aren’t going to be possible with anything longer than a few sentences at most. When it comes to quotes, the shorter the better, so find a way to trim. Use ellipses if you have to trim the fat.
Instead of this…
Try one of these…
2. MEMORABLE
If it’s not memorable, maybe you should just paraphrase the thought in your own words. If you’re trying to make the point that customers have been asking for more color choices for your widgets, you might be best served by using a slide that says “68% of customers expressed interest in additional color options” instead of putting up the text of a random customer email request. But if your company’s biggest customer, Mary Jones, just called screaming…that could be a good quote slide…
3. APPROPRIATE IMAGERY
Think about the image (or lack of image) that will best communicate the story and message of your quote. Often, I like to use a full screen image of the quoted as I think it helps make the quote more sticky, but usually only if the person is known to begin with. In these back to back slides, I told the story of one of the most famous campaign refrains in recent memory and how it came to be, so I wanted the known players shown to make the story as concrete as possible. Note that I felt only one of these required textual attribution…
But sometimes appropriate imagery is no imagery. With this quote from the same presentation, I felt that a photo would actually distract from the point being made…
There could very well be a picture of Einstein or something else that could work well here, but I don’t think it’s one of these below. See how the essence of the quote gets diminished by the introduction of photos? You might disagree, but I thought so…
And sometimes the best way to put a quote on the screen is not to put it on the screen. Consider using a black screen and forcing your audience to listen to and watch you.
Last month I heard a speaker who finished his talk (that had used just a single image on screen) with a quote from Isadora Duncan. Though he had written the whole speech, he paraphrased his words when he spoke. But when he arrived at the end, he took out a piece of paper and read the quote verbatim with nothing behind him. Since it was a longer quote, it was very effective not to have the words on the screen. However, if he did request a visual, I might have suggested keeping the words off the screen, but showing something like this or this…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuant63/3152875867/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what’s next or how.
The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
The artist never entirely knows. We guess.
We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
