Should the slides in a presentation be self-explanatory or be as minimal as possible?

Question

When you do a research presentation, what is usually the focus that you take.Some professors tell me to make the slides as self explanatory as possible, and I quote:> Someone should be able to understand your slides without you being thereTo me, this approach seems counter intuitive to the principle of a "talk". After all, you already wrote a paper that meets that objective.Other people, for example in things like TED talks or (please bear with me) presentations by Apple, have very bare bones slides, where they only focus on transmitting the main message of the talk. What is your take, should the presentation be made as didactic as possible or just a cold transference of information?

Answer 1

Hello! PowerPoint specifically was intended to be used as a speech tool to help the audience follow along with what the presenter is saying (hence the name power-point=powerful main points). In helping students with presentations, I always encourage them to use slideshows as an enhancing tool rather than letting it do all of the work. From an audience perspective, no one wants to have to read more than a few sentences from a slide. Further, if the audience is reading the slides, they are not going to be able to focus on the speaker. However, professors always have the last say because they are the ones grading the project. Even though I disagree with filling slides with a lot of information, and even though Microsoft disagrees with that use of PowerPoint, if a professor wants a slide loaded with content then that is what students should give them. I hope this helps!