Are subpar slides, riddled with grammatical errors, ruining your presentation?

Presentations are conducted in order to communicate your ideas effectively to your targeted audience.

The effectiveness or impact of a presentation not only depends upon on how you present, but of course,  the content itself. 

There are a few important guidelines to follow when it comes to creating impactful presentation slides.

Here are 4 guidelines:

1. Making your slides attractive with alluring color contrasts and consistent, attractive, easy-to-read fonts.

2. Keep your ideas clear, and only include the most important points.

3. Pay attention to proper spacing, don’t cram the slide full, it will distract from what you are trying to say. Break down larger paragraphs of information with bullet points and lists.  

4. Content should be free from typos or grammatical errors.

Let’s focus on how to avoid common writing errors in presentations.

Common errors that your audience will spot in your presentation

The most common writing errors presenters make on their slides are:

• grammatical errors in sentences,

• mixing of homophones,

• abuse of punctuation,

• incorrect capitalization.

These types of writing errors can immediately create a bad impression with your audience, it dilutes the message that you want to convey, and it can negatively impact what you are trying to achieve.

Poor grammar and spelling errors are considered subpar and may jeopardize your credibility, because your audience will think that, either you did not put a good effort into your presentation, or that you do not know how to write properly.  

3 ways to avoid grammatical errors

Here are 3 things you can do right now to ensure your presentation has flawless grammar:

• Study up on grammar: read through the infographic below to see some common mistake people make when writing.
  Top tip: view ProWritingAid’s top 10 list of helpful grammar websites “10 websites to help improve your grammar”

• Download the Grammarly app and browser extension: this innovative and free tool is far more thorough than your average spellchecker. It automatically proofreads and coaches you on how to improve your grammar over time.

• Find someone to do a final review: Sometimes, especially when we have been making a lot of edits over time, you (and your grammar checking apps) will simply miss small errors. Having a colleague, assistant, mentor, event organizer, friend, or family member do a final read-through will help weed-out any lingering errors.

Some of the more common writing errors are listed in the infographic below.

Would you like more tips on creating great presentation slides? See the articles below:

• Creating effective presentation slides: which platform to use?

• Presentation slides: from boring to engaging and shareable

• Advice from iconic speakers that will teach you about giving great talks

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