How to Make the Most Memorable PowerPoint Presentation
Whether making a presentation for school, work, or extracurricular club or organization, one of the main goals should be to leave a lasting impression on your audience. In order to do this, you must know how different aspects of your presentation will affect your audience. A key component of this is to find the perfect balance between verbal cues, written cues, and imagery. These aspects can also be used to affect people’s emotions and opinions, which can improve memory depending on how they are used.
The dual-coding theory helps us to understand the effects of information that is presented verbally vs. visually. For example, it helps us to understand that while images may help your audience to make connections and better retain the material you are presenting, there are instances when it may actually distract from the point you are trying to make. When you want your audience to remember a specific point, and not just a concept, it may be appropriate to include a sentence or quote on your PowerPoint that they can read as well as hear you speak about. When you want your audience to remember a concept that can be illustrated via an image, it is appropriate to include an image that will help them commit the idea to memory. If you included a vivid or distracting image on a slide when you are trying to get a specific point across, it is likely that your audience will end up remembering the image but not the connection to your presentation, because our brains process and associate information differently depending on whether we acquired it through visual or auditory processes.
A key determinant of what we do and don’t commit to memory is emotion. When strong emotions are connected to our memories, we are more likely to remember more details about the event or information. You can incorporate this into your PowerPoint presentation by inserting images or example stories that will invoke feelings of anger, excitement, fear, happiness, or disgust. Be sure to keep these images and stories relevant to your initial point, otherwise your audience will remember the thing that gave them that emotion, but not necessarily the important material it is related to.
People are more likely to remember something that they have engaged with and made their own conclusions about than something that they are simply told to believe. So to create the sensation of cognitive interaction with whatever material you are presenting, it may be useful to use tools such as framing and priming. This can be achieved by using words that suggest a way of thinking about a concept without overtly telling someone what to think about it. Framing can be used to emphasize certain aspects or details that you want your audience to focus on, which will affect how they understand and remember the topic.
