Please, please, don't write in slides
Many of us write information in slides for the dual purpose of presenting and reading. The resulting slideuments make both presentations and documents ineffective. There are better ways to convey information.
- If you have time and design skills at your disposal, create infodecks only for reading.
- Rest of the time, make your regular documents readable.
- Write like you'd speak. Avoid corporate jargon.
- Get to the point as early in the document as possible.
- Add images and emojis to clarify and liven up your message.
- Structure your document using bullets, headers, tables and other features so it's easy to scan.
- And if you're still keen to leave behind your presentation slides, record a video of your presentation instead. That way you can retain the same design for the sync and async artefacts.
Working async-first isn’t a black magic trick. It’s a simple concept and I like to boil it down to three tenets.
Meetings are the last resort, not the first option.
Writing is the primary communication mechanism for async-first teams.
We all must build comfort with reasonable lags in communication.
#2 often throws people off a bit. I hear objections such as “Oh, but I’m not a writer;” or “People didn’t sign up to be writers when they took up their careers.” While people are not writers, they aren’t professional speakers either. People didn’t sign up to be writers, but most people in the knowledge work industry have a minimum of 16 years of formal education. Guess what they did for all of those 16 years? They wrote. If you have 16 years of experience doing anything in the tech industry, you’re a bonafide “expert”. Even if you don’t call yourself that, your employers will.
Why the caginess about writing then? I postulate three reasons.
It’s harder than setting up a meeting and just talking. Much like how it’s harder to exercise than to binge on a bar of chocolate. The apparent cost of setting up a meeting is just a few clicks. The true cost however, is the salary equivalent or the opportunity cost of every attendee’s time. Plus, of course, the cost of the time it takes to get back to whatever we were doing before the interruption.
We have a mental model of what it takes to be a “writer”. We fear that if we write, we must be like Tharoor, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, or Rowling or Sheldon or Steel or Cartland. But of course, that’s creative or editorial writing. Business writing needn’t be creative at all. It’s more journalistic than editorial. Short sentences, active voice, and bullet points will get you far more mileage than long, ornate prose. And as I mentioned earlier, most of us have at least 16 years of experience doing this before even the first day of our careers.
The industry has a bunch of bad habits. We’ve discussed some of these habits earlier. We’re always task-switching, rarely focussing. Many of us still hold up the open-office as a paragon of “collaboration”, despite all the evidence against it. So, interruptions are the norm and we don’t get time to write. And then, if we write, we often write in slides.
Wait, what? Write in slides? Well, yes. And I’m sure you’ve seen this yourself. Heck, I’ve done it myself as well. Guilty as charged!
If you’ve normalised this approach to writing and sharing information, then I’m here to tell you that you should write differently. That’s what this post is about.
Meet the “slideument”
“Slides are slides. Documents are documents. They aren't the same thing. Attempts to merge them result in what I call the "slideument" (slide + document = slideument).”
Many bad practices emerge from a paucity of time and a lack of thought about design. Slideuments are no different. The intent is to “kill two birds with one stone”. You can use the same artefact to present a topic and people can read it afterwards. Nifty, no? Except, not. Just like you’ve rarely seen a single stone kill two birds, a single artefact will not suffice for both presentation and for reading.
There are two major problems with writing in slides.
You’re always trying to fit the form-factor of the slides. Whether it’s the more modern 2.4:1 ratio or the 16:9 HD ratio or the old school 3:2 or 4:3 ratio, it’s a constraint that doesn’t always add value to your writing.
Since the legacy of this approach is in creating dual-purpose artefacts, it promotes poor writing. Sentences are incomplete. Several words are unsaid, because you probably plan to say them when you present. With all of that unspoken context, these artefacts are tough to understand.
Of course, when you write a bunch of text in your slides, it undermines your presentation itself, but that’s a separate topic.
What about the infodeck?
There are of course, artefacts that you create in presentation software, which aren’t for presentation at all. They’re just for reading. Here are the reasons you may choose this approach.
Presentation software allows you to flexibly layout text, design elements and imagery.
The form factor encourages brevity and discourages long prose.
You can end up with a document that’s easy to consume and has a high recall.
What we easily undermine, is the fact that creating an effective infodeck, or a slidedoc, takes time and skill. It definitely takes more skill than writing complete sentences in a word processor or what we usually do; i.e., writing incoherent bullets on a slide.
Duarte design offers a free guide and an online course, to learn about visual documents
If you have the time, energy and design skills to create and maintain such artefacts, do so by all means. Nancy Duarte offers a free guide and a 90 minute online course for anyone who wants to learn how to create these visual documents.
Rest of us, rest of the time
Given the time and design skills we need to build infodecks, I don’t imagine each of us will create them every day. These artefacts are also tough to maintain and more difficult to search and index. So, it makes sense to use them sparingly. Instead, build a relationship with your favourite word processor. Simple, easy-to-understand bullet points are good enough. Don’t even try to be too creative. If you’re trying to engage people by writing long prose, you’re being inefficient. Be boring. Boring is efficient. And by the way, this post is NOT an example of the way to write on your teams.
Here’s some advice on how to be an everyday writer at work.
Write like a human
Here’s a real sentence from an actual email.
“Our approach was to research, design and construct a policy to facilitate & simplify a collaborative development journey among multiple entities with shared interests to create meaningful value for users or the ecosystem, keeping in view the larger social good.”
Try reading that aloud in a single breath. Does that sound like how anyone would speak in real life? It sure doesn’t to me. I suggest writing like you’d speak. There are a few different techniques that help me stay human when I write.
Choose simple words over fancy ones. The plain English campaign has an A-to-Z of alternative words to help you do this. Avoid pretentious phrases from French or Latin. Ditch cliches and colloquialisms that don’t resonate across cultures. Your goal isn’t to look posh, but for people to understand what you’re writing.
Once you’ve written a paragraph, read it aloud to yourself. Does it sound like how you would, if you were speaking? If not, tweak it to sound like you. If you don’t enjoy reading aloud to yourself, use your computer’s text-to-speech feature.
Write for an eighth-grader. The Flesch-Kincaid readability test scores your writing and tells you how difficult it is to comprehend. Aim for a score of 60 and above, which is simple enough for an eighth grader to understand. There are several free online tools to score your text and Microsoft Word has this feature built in.
Write in an active voice. Compare the following sentences.
The project manager will compile the sprint report.
The sprint report will be compiled by the project manager.
The sprint report will be compiled.
#1 is what you’d call an “active voice”. It follows the pattern, subject-verb-object. Someone does something to something else. This is a crisper, more confident way to write than #2, which is a passive voice and #3 which is an impersonal instruction. #3 is also ambiguous because it’s unclear who will compile the report. Writing in an active voice makes ownership clear.
Don’t bury the lede
Get to the point. And get to it fast. While I don’t intend to normalise poor attention spans, I also realise it’s an uphill battle to fight against them. In a previous post, I explained the inverted pyramid of journalism where you structure your writing in a descending order of importance.
To hold yourself accountable to this way of writing, temporarily delete the bottom third of your writing and ask yourself if the reader will miss crucial information if you only sent them this truncated draft. If yes, then restructure your writing.
Let pictures speak a thousand words
Diagrams and images often help us understand a topic more effectively than text alone. Where applicable, create a diagram to simplify what you’re writing. Between Draw.io, Google Drawings and Visio, there are plenty of tools to help you create clean diagrams. Don’t underestimate presentation tools either. Most diagrams are a combination of boxes and arrows. PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides are quite capable at creating these simple, explanatory images. In fact, here’s a secret. Almost every diagram you see on this site, originated in Keynote. I didn’t need any specialised software!
Oh, and don’t forget emojis 😊. They’re images too! Not only do they liven up your writing, they can also help draw attention to various kinds of information. Here are a few examples.
⏰or 🗓️for deadlines
📊for data
🛑for risks
💡for ideas
💵for costs
🫶🏽for benefits
🚨for alerts
You can build your own conventions with emojis. After all, we use them so frequently these days that you and your team possibly know a million uses for them already.
Make it scannable
And last but not least, be kind to whoever will read what you write. Make it easy for them to consume your writing. Add structure. Break things up. Make details pop out. Here are some easy ways to do so.
Wherever you can deconstruct text into several constituent parts, consider using bullet points. They’re easier to scan than big blobs of text. You’ll also force yourself to make just one, concise point, per bullet.
Use italicised, bold and underlined text to make specific text pop out. Some text may benefit from a highlight as well.
Deconstruct your writing into headings and subheadings. Make these navigable using a table of contents. That way you can lead people into your document by showing them the structure up front. A reader can jump across headings by clicking on them. They can also fast forward to a section they’re interested in.
Categorise multi-dimensional content using tables. They’re easier to parse, than if you were to write long text under separate sub-headings.
Use specialised formatting, such as callouts or quote blocks for specific kinds of content. The summary block you see on top of this article, is an example of such a callout. Depending on the tools you use, you’ll find several built-in options. For example, Google Docs has smart chips, Notion has its blocks, and Confluence has its macros.
Once you write with these ideas in mind, you’ll notice that modern tools make the whole exercise quite enjoyable. You may find that it’s easier to construct an engaging document than to make slides look visually appealing. And since writing is the primary means to communicate in async-first teams, this is a good thing.
If you still want to distribute the same slides you present, I suggest a recorded video instead. There are plenty of tools available to simplify the recording process. Recorded video does indeed kill two birds with one stone.
You leave behind an artefact for people to refer to, even when you’re not around to explain the idea.
You can design your slides just for presenting. That way, you limit the amount of text on your slides and you can design each visual like a billboard.
I recently did a talk at the Kanban India conference. Even if the organisers put out a video of that talk, watching the recording won’t be a suitable experience for people online. Instead, I’ve recorded a crisp version of the talk, just for the internet. Interestingly, the online version packs more information, in less time than the live talk did. I’ve embedded the playlist above. 📺4 videos, 🕒15 minutes, 40 seconds. See what I did there?