When you are delivering a speech with a PowerPoint presentation attached, there becomes a power balance that needs to be maintained between yourself and the PowerPoint. Both you and your set of slides have the ability to overpower and undercut the other, so a proper balancing act must be performed.

Your PowerPoint slides should compliment what you say and shouldn’t distract the audience, therefore, you must ensure that the PowerPoint does not hold too much power. Furthermore, you can’t ignore your slides and take all the power for yourself, doing so leads to a disconnect between what the audience is seeing and what they are hearing, often leaving them confused.

Perfecting this power balance is an important step in ensuring that your PowerPoint adds to the persuasive nature of your speech. This is why careful preparation and consideration of both your slide design as well as your delivery is required.

Balancing logos, ethos and pathos appeals

The first thing to consider is how you can use your slides to balance out your modes of appeal. As students, we are conditioned to use PowerPoint to present research and facts with little regard for anything else. This often means that we create slides packed with information, facts, statistics, etc. You can think of this as taking a Pedant’s stance in Wayne Booth’s “The Rhetorical Stance,” which is something we avoid in our speeches and therefore, must avoid in our slides as well. PowerPoint slides do not exist just to strengthen your logos appeals by presenting facts and research.

When creating a persuasive PowerPoint, your slides must also be used to strengthen your ethos and pathos appeals. For example, if you are doing a speech on travelling, you could strengthen your ethos appeals by having a slide that shows pictures you took while on vacation, establishing your footing on the topic. Or, if you’re doing a speech on pet adoption and you are trying to strengthen your pathos appeals, showing an image of a caged animal can be used to elicit an emotional response from your audience.

There are many creative ways you can use your slides to strengthen all three modes of appeal, so don’t hesitate to step out of the box.

Preparation and Delivery Tips

Adding a slide deck to your speech can be a curveball if you are not well prepared. It requires thinking about different aspects of your delivery and preparing in a different manner than you are used to.

Here are some tips to help you better prepare for giving a persuasive speech with a PowerPoint presentation:

Understand the limitations of the room

Gaining an understanding of the room you will be presenting in beforehand to understand important factors that might affect the way you present can help you come more prepared. For example, knowing the technological limitations such as how you change the slides, how many screens there are, if you can plug in your own computer or if you need to have a USB drive, etc. is important in knowing how to practice and prepare your presentation.

If the room is very big but the screen is relatively small, you may consider increasing the font size in your slides. If the only way to see your slides when you’re at the front is by turning around, you may want to bring a printout of your slides, so you don’t have to break your connection to the audience by constantly looking behind you. If there is no clicker you can hold in your hand to move through slides you may consider having someone else at the computer to do it for you or see if you can bring your own.

If you cannot gain access to the room prior to your presentation, thinking about different scenarios and how you can be prepared for them will still be beneficial.

Practice your speech while clicking through your slides

Incorporating the task of clicking through your slides while delivering your speech can pose a significant challenge the first few times. Balancing the clicker in one hand while holding your speech card in the other requires careful coordination and concentration to avoid disrupting the flow of your presentation.

To effectively overcome this obstacle, it is crucial to practice your speech while flipping through your slides simultaneously. By simulating the conditions of the actual presentation as close as possible, you can familiarize yourself with the mechanics of transitioning between slides while maintaining your train of thought.

This will ensure that you will remain a credible speaker by looking prepared and you won’t sacrifice your rhythm and audience connection by pausing to change the slide.

Ensure your slides correspond to what you are saying in your speech

Maintaining a consistent message between your verbal delivery and your slides is paramount for enhancing the persuasive impact of your speech. Each slide should directly support the point being made in the corresponding section of your speech to ensure relevance and clarity throughout.

Focus on creating a sequential flow between what you are saying and slide progression to guide the gaze of your audience through your argument. It is important to practice coordinating your slide transitions with your verbal transitions to maintain a seamless argument and to keep your audience engaged. Practicing this will ensure that you don’t forget a slide and that you won’t have to pause every time you switch slides.

PowerPoint Design Tips

The way you design your slides will vary greatly depending on what your topic is, but there are still a few universal guidelines that are important to keep in mind to ensure that your slides are well thought out and don’t take away from your speech:

Less is always more

When creating a persuasive PowerPoint to go along with your speech, the less information you have on your slides, the better. Keeping your text constrained to only key concepts in point form is a good rule of thumb. Writing out full sentences or paragraphs is almost never a good idea as the audience members will be occupied by reading what is on your slide rather than listening to what you are saying, taking away from your speech.

The idea of less is more can also be applied to visuals. Too many pictures on one slide can be just as distracting as too many words. Visual elements on the slides should serve as a reinforcement for what you are saying and complement your key points, too many pictures will give the audience too much to look at and will lead to a distracted audience.

Visualize information

Using PowerPoint is a great way to visualize information that you are presenting to your audience and can significantly enhance the impact that your speech has. By showing visual representations of data, you can effectively convey complex data and concepts in a manner that is both engaging and persuasive.

Rather than solely relying on verbal descriptions or numerical figures, incorporating visually appealing elements such as charts, graphs or diagrams can help the audience better grasp the information being presented. For instance, a well-designed pie chart or bar graph can offer a clear concise overview of numerical data.

Additionally, incorporating a creative visual metaphor or analogy can add depth and context to a large number. For example, to illustrate how much plastic is thrown in the ocean each year, you could use a graphic, such as a line of school buses that it would fill up, to provide a more relatable and impactful comparison.

More PowerPoint Design Tips

• Don’t know how to even begin setting up your PowerPoint presentation? This video goes through a step-by-step process of where to start and includes several things to think about when laying out your presentation and your speech.

• Want to make your slides look even more sophisticated and well put together? This article gives some great tips such as thinking about the story you want to tell, how to choose the right chart or graph to fit your data and how to organize your points on your slides.