Transform Your Health Presentations: Strategies for Clear, Engaging Slides

Prepared by Samuel Mendez

Summary

Slideshow presentations can be helpful tools for health communicators. We use them to share knowledge with other professionals. We use them for patient education. And we use them for community outreach. But we know they can be overwhelming or just plain boring. This tipsheet offers advice to elevate your health communication by making compelling, memorable presentations:

1. State your main finding in your title.
2. Give your audience one takeaway per slide.
3. Use text sparingly.

Read on to see these tips in action.

Tip 1: State your main finding in your title

This tip applies to academic presentations and TED talks alike. No matter the context, your title can draw people in. Key findings give potential audiences more info to go off as they decide whether to engage with your work. It might also capture more people’s interest to know the impact of your work. While it might take some getting used to, you can follow the example of real-world examples from leaders in the field. Nature research articles tend to use key findings as titles. And Nature news articles translate them into even shorter informative titles.

Example titles

Suppose we made a presentation titled, “Developing a battery of blood protein tests to predict patients’ mortality from multiple chronic diseases.” This might accurately describe our study. But it does not reflect our findings. Instead, we could use a shorter and more informative title like this Nature article: “Proteomic aging clock predicts mortality and risk of common age-related diseases in diverse populations.” This might be fine for a conference of content-area experts. But for a broader audience, we might use less jargon, like this Nature news report on the research: “Blood test uses ‘protein clock’ to predict risk of Alzheimer’s.”

Learn how to make compelling titles

• Use this guide from Nature to make compelling scientific presentations, including titles.

Tip 2: Give your audience one takeaway per slide

We recommend one takeaway per slide, no matter your audience. Your slide should explicitly state this takeaway like a headline. And you should give your audience the smallest amount of info possible to support or illustrate the headline. This helps give your presentation a consistent structure. And it helps you avoid giving people too much information at once. Keeping things consistent and brief is good for accessibility and memorability.

Example slide organized around a takeaway

The following example slides are adapted from a study on slide design by Garner and Alley. The first slide displays a common slide setup. The heading describes a topic. The body states related facts. The images are decorative.

In contrast, the slide below displays an “assertion-evidence” setup. The heading states a takeaway. The body consists of an illustration to support the takeaway. The images now serve an illustrative purpose rather than just being decorative.

Learn how to streamline your slides

• Use tips from Penn State’s Science Communication Lab to make “assertion-evidence” slides.
• Use elevator pitch tips from the Harvard Center for Health Communication.

Tip 3: Use text sparingly

Your audience won’t pay attention to you and your slides at the same time, so make sure to:

• Use as little text as possible to avoid overloading your audience.
• Use images instead of text wherever you can.
• If you must use text, use short lists limited to 4 points.

If you like to use wordy slides as take-home resources for your audience, you can still create handouts separate from your presentations.

Example presentation

The presenter in the video below uses very little text. Her slides include photos, figures, and a quote. Even still, she tells a compelling story that gets across several important, complex concepts from her research.

Learn more about slide design

• Use our slide design checklist
• Read “Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides” by KM Naegle

Conclusion

This tipsheet offers advice on making memorable, accessible slideshow presentations:

• Create a compelling title based on your findings.
• Organize your presentation around takeaways.
• Organize your presentation around key images, rather than writing a lot of text for your slides.

This tipsheet is part of a series on clear communication. It bridges knowledge from health literacy, web accessibility, and journalism to help you elevate your health communication. Combine your clear design with clearer writing and accessible graphs and tables for even more impact.

This tipsheet was prepared by Samuel R. Mendez. It was reviewed by Amanda Yarnell and Elissa Scherer.