beyond bullets

Headline news: Research shows that it matters what you write at the top of a slide

Does it really matter what you put at the top of your PowerPoint slides?

Absolutely, according to researcher Michael Alley, who tested two designs for teaching slides on two groups of students -- one design with the conventional category heading at the top, and another with a complete sentence headline at the top. The result? A significant improvement in test scores among students who saw the slides with complete sentence headlines.

That's headline news for those of you using BBP, because the approach requires that you write complete sentences in the story template, which then become the headlines of the frames of your PowerPoint storyboard.

(Read more about Alley's work here, and read more about how you can start transforming your headings to headlines at a previous post titled Signal to Noise.)

"First Five Slides" webinar recording now online

In case you missed my Feb. 20 webinar titled "The First Five Slides", you can now view the archived recording hosted at the Microsoft Office System Webcasts site.  You can access the link through my web seminar archive page here.