All about handouts

Do you prepare handouts for your presentation?

Handouts, these additional pieces of paper you hand out to your audience. Before or afterwards? Hmm...

I would like to make a case for more effective handouts that accompany your presentation and actually help your audience understand you better.

First of all, I want to clear up some terminology: I distinguish - in contrary to many people I know - between "handouts" and "printouts".
A printout of your slides is not a handout in my opinion. A handout should add value to your talk and help your audience to follow along.

I have never gotten a handout that accompanied any of my lectures. I got printouts. Some feature 6 slides per page, some three with additional lines for note-taking. Of course in black and white so you can rarely identify a graph with many colored lines on it. In my opinion this is a waste of paper. Sometimes I think: "Oh gosh, this poor tree, if it would only know what it had become." Seriously though, I have a simple rule, which, when applied, can make presentations so much better, especially lectures. 

Put all the text that is on your slides into a word processing document and accompany your talk with visuals in a PowerPoint, if desired.

So many times I look at lecture slides and think to myself, this is a paragraph of a textbook divided into bullet points. Text is for textbooks and journals. A presentation - especially a lecture - should appeal not to verbal learners only, but to visual and auditorial learners as well. Afterwards you can mention books to read, but usually I read a dumbed down version of a textbook on the big lecture theatre screen. I will come back to this issue in later posts.

Back to handouts. They can release your actual presentation from so much distracting clutter, but so many people don't do it. "Here are your slides to follow along". I find this confusing to be honest. I tested several methods in a couple of lectures recently:
In the first lecture, I read through the whole set of slides and unfortunately encountered that the lecturer didn't give any additional information what so ever. So why doesn't he or she just send us the slides to read and just skips the lecture?? This is not the case in every lecture I will gladly add.
Oh well, another time, I put the printout aside and just concentrated on the lecturer. I listened to him without looking at the slides and tool notes on my notepad. It was hard, but I found this the most effective way, unfortunately. This made the slides redundant, on screen as well as on paper.
Then I tried the approach that is apparently the way to do it... Take the printout, highlight the headings of the slides, take notes, listen to the lecturer and pay attention to the awesome slides on the screen. It doesn't work out for me, personally. I'm not saying that this method is ineffective in some ways and some might get along well, but I find the following approach much better:

• Create a script of what you want to say in your presentation.
• Create a handout which has the following contents
• a coversheet with title, date, and the agenda for the day
• one or two sheets for notes
• a summary of facts, definitions, tables, graphs, additional reading and the lot in the order, in which you are presenting them
• Create a PowerPoint (or similar) with VISUALS that explain, highlight and reinforce the content on your handout in a meaningful way.

So, now you have a script for yourself, that hopefully helps you not to read off the screen. But you can't read off the screen anyway, because there are almost no words on it anymore - hopefully. You hand the agenda or table of contents out to your audience, so they can follow along your presentation and can, if they like, check at any time, where your are in your presentation. This eliminates the need for an on screen agenda. You might show them visuals that relate to the points in the agenda.
Now, if your text, that was previously on your slides, is now on the handout, nothing horrible has happened, right? Your audience can still read the text on their handout in a much nicer format. Remember it was previously on the printed slides! Text can be very easily word processed, but anyone will struggle to put it onto slides effectively.
So I argue that your text is still there for your audience to read, in a better format and that there is now a big opportunity on the screen to reinforce this text. Show examples on the slides, visualize a definition or concept. If you think, it is better in text form, remember it is still on the handout for everybody to read and refer to at anytime, not only during the while the slide is on the screen. This makes slide printouts redundant and you can still upload your presentation to the web for your audience to see. Because a presentation should be experienced, not read!

What do you think about that? I think this approach would make presentations much more effective. It will take more time to create, but I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages here. Text will become more readable, concepts more visual and you will become the master of your presentation. Not the other way round. More on that later.

Please share this posts with those you think will benefit the most from it. From my experience I would say, that this will be true for students and educators, but anyone will essentially benefit. All that it takes, is to understand the true role of a handout.

To wrap up, here are the main features of a handout:

• it's not a printout of your slides
• it comprises text, graphics, tables and other useful information, you would have put onto slides
• it adds value to your presentation by giving additional information and releasing the slides from clutter and non-visual item (namely text)
• it makes a printout of your slides redundant
• it will help your audience to review the presentation, if they chose to look at it another time online, for example

That's it for this week. I hope you found this useful and interesting. Maybe I could open some eyes. Please tell me if you disagree, but make your case.

Have a good week.