Slide Presentations: Why The Rule of 6 Doesn't work!

For those of us that have taken classes on how to prepare a PowerPoint Presentation, particularly in schools of education at colleges and universities across the country, we all learned from our professors how to create slide presentations being sure to follow the Rule of 6. Unfortunately for all of us, the people that were telling us this really don't understand that the Rule of 6 is not a rule to follow, but rather, it is a threshold of pain!

You have to understand where the rule came from. I started teaching in the 80's before PowerPoint even existed. We used transparencies which were sheets of plastic placed on a lighted screen and then reflected on the wall. In the late 1980's, 3M developed single plastic sheets you could run through a copier. These cost 50 cents a sheet for black and white slides and $1 for color slides. Because it was so expensive, people would cram as much information on a slide as they could.

This bad habit begat another technique called REVEAL, where you laid a white sheet of paper over your slide and then pulled it down to reveal one line or bullet at a time. The technique was invented to cover up the flaw that we had so much information on the page to begin with.

Along the way, someone said, if you are going to fill the page with information, try not to put more than 6 lines per slide and no more than 6 words per line. Thus, the rule of 6 was born. They were letting people know if you put more info than that on a slide, no one would remember it or understand the message. It became the maximum limit before painfully boggling people's minds.

What they should have said is "Keep it Simple". That is the rule and always has been. We have long since learned that a slide full of text will not be remembered. People remember what they SEE not what they read. You are far more effective with a simple image and a caption to highlight the point than you ever will with a full screen of text.

One more thing, those that taught us how to make these kinds of slides didn't understand that the slides are NOT for the presenter, its for the audience. It is a visual media to display our message. It is not a cue card reader for us to read from like a note card. Just think, why would we invent a technology where you have to turn your back to the audience to see the next point?? Our problem isn't that we can't remember what to say, our problem is we do not practice!