One idea a week to help you teach and present with more clarity, confidence, and calm. No fluff. No scripts. Just practical tools that land.
“Don't make them read it while you're saying it.”
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Ever tried reading a dense slide while someone talks over it? You remember neither. That’s the split attention effect in action. 💡 ONE IDEA WELLWhen text and narration compete, everyone loses. This is the split attention effect - when visuals and speech demand attention at the same time, but don’t align. And yet, most of us still do this without realising… 🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGEHere’s how to fix it:
If you want people to remember what you said, 🧭 ASK YOURSELF THISAm I making them choose between my slides and my voice? P.S. Want to go full nerd? Here's the original study that changed how we think about slide design: |
TEACHING ISN’T A SCRIPT. NEITHER IS THIS.
One idea a week to help you teach and present with more clarity, confidence, and calm. No fluff. No scripts. Just practical tools that land.
I once saw a brilliant doctor explain febrile convulsions to a parent. He started with: “It’s about hypothalamic thermoregulation.” Accurate? Yes.Useful? Not even close. The parent nodded politely.But nothing landed. 💡 ONE IDEA WELL The more you know, the harder it is to explain. This is The Curse of Knowledge—a bias where we forget what it’s like not to know something. We assume shared language. Shared logic. Shared leaps. But when we present from that place, we leave people behind. We skip...
“I’ll just talk through this slide…” Harmless phrase, right? Except it usually means: 👉 I haven’t crafted a message - just collected some slides. 💡 ONE IDEA WELL This is one of the most common traps for early presenters: Thinking the slide is the presentation. But here’s the truth: Slides support your message. They shouldn’t be your message. If your audience can get everything they need from the slide, they don’t need you. And if they can’t make sense of the slide without you, they’re...
My first talk in English class was about bats. I was 14.I brought in a desiccated pipistrelle to show everyone.Instead of an acetate, I held up a wallpaper scroll I'd drawn with outlines of bat species. Another student read a piece on VW Combi vans. No images. No props. Just words. I had figured out you could do it the same way it had always been done.Or you could do something different.More memorable. 💡 ONE IDEA WELL We often treat presentations like assignments.Say the thing. Prove you know...