They Snooze you Lose by Burmark - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is about creating slides and handouts. Burmark encourage presenters to use as many visuals in our slides as we can. Mayer’s research confirms that the best way to foster learning involves both words and pictures.1 The audience will remember more the pictures than the words.
In the handouts we need to make sure to include the outline of the presentation with the most significant information, we need to make sure to not include visuals.
According to Burmark the electronic presentation needs to have full-color photographic illustrations and the paper handout full of boring black-and-white text that would be a waste on the screen.
Although many presenters use to give the URL for the website at the beginning of the presentation, it is important for the audience to get at least a copy of the handout to make notes and write comments that in most of the cases would forget by the time the presentation ends. The handouts should be in two-column format and with limited pictures with margins that allow the audience to write comments on it.

I completely agree with the author, many of the presentations I have seen are bored because they lack images. On the other hand, the handouts should not be printed in color with all the images you may see on the presentation because it is a waste of ink and paper.


1 Mayer, Richard E., Multimedia Learning (2nd ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)