So I have also experienced my managed pushing me to put all the information on the slide so that you can just read the slides and understand all the ideas, and the presenter is reduced to a voice over.
When you present it - It’s a nice deck of slides that keep people interested and help them to listen to the presentation. But when they download the deck, they see the slides that have all the details.
The notes in each slide, go into detail. I also like to use transitions and animations (not too obnoxious, though). Many of the slides in the shows referenced below, need to be played, as they may have a number of "steps."
Makes it worthwhile to ask for my slides, and helps me to stay on track. I generally don't read the notes verbatim, but stay on the topics they describe.
Examples: [0], [1], [2], [3], [4]
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master/tree/master/P... (A couple of Keynote presentations that are part of a teaching module on Core Bluetooth)
[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qQDAuhGvBvBlZVH2zn_V... (Google Slides -Discusses effective communication)
[2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11ZvUjZogJ86-AIsAv1Q3... (Google Slides -A basic -and dated- intro to the Swift Programming Language)
[3] https://littlegreenviper.com/cruft/CommunicationBasics.pptx (Downloads a PowerPoint for [1])
[4] https://littlegreenviper.com/a-quick-introduction-to-the-swi... (Blog entry for [2])
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/6/annotated-presentations...
We shouldn’t conflate expertise from one field with ability in another.
It's not a new way of giving presentations. It's a way of publishing your presentations after you have given them where you turn the slides into a longer form written piece.
So it can't be "not a good way to do a presentation at all", because I give presentations exactly the same as everyone else does! Slides with images and a few words.
What's different is that I take the time to write them up properly afterwards.
Here's my most recent example - in this case it wasn't a whole presentation, just the slide portion from a three hour workshop: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/15/building-on-llms/#llm-...
Bunch more examples here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-talks/
For short focused presentations (<10 min) minimal slides are the best if the verbal presentation is strong. For longer and more complicated ones more detailed slides are better for the audience. Audience will get distracted or misdirected at times, and making a clear and well flowing enough speech for more detailed and longer presentations is extremely hard.
It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”.
That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations
The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?
In my opinion this works well for technical presentations. I’ve given more than a few talks following the style and I’ve always been told it’s good stage presence and I’ve gotten a lot of compliments from the audience
https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
That way if I sent people the deck they'd still have all the content.
It's a while since I put anything on Slideshare, and I think it now does include notes, but it used to annoy me that back in the day it didn't.
I applaud the effort to record such talks, especially in the current age where you know few people will actually watch it and appreciate your effort (but some big LLM provider will certainly lift it as part of a mass scrape and charge a few bucks for access to your findings without crediting you).
And there lies the trouble with slides: During a talk they should support what is being said, but they are often abused as also being the handout for afterwards.
If people want that, produce two artifacts. Don’t try shoehorn a talk into being documentation. That’s just a recipe for bad work.
A technical talk however explains a concept, a tool or something and thus contains technical information to follow up with, but for that I need the words, the phrases stated so I even know what to look for in the manual. And probably I want to follow it in the order they presented it (I hope they thought about the order they presented it in!) however the manual is ordered more in a reference order.
So yeah, if you do a high level marketing talk it doesn't matter, but then I also won't spend the time on watching a second time. If it has technical depth, then being able to follow the depth is good.
It is not that complicated really, no need to reinvent the wheel.
Thankfully speech recognition and AI summary is a thing now.
Reading a bullet point summary of Moby Dick certainly would compress the time required to understand the plot.
Isn’t the prose or phrasing part of the transmission?
This gives me an idea for a website. All of the talks of a conference, audio transcribed and LLM summarized into 3-minute reads.
It might be worth doing the whole INFOCON archive…
Is it that asking for a copy is an unreasonable burden that should require a significant time investment from me?
I've sent many copies of many things I made in my live. It's not so bad. And it's easily shared with many people at once.
Or is it that people can't ingest any meaningful information in less than an hour?
That's clearly not true either. A five minute article can contain extremely valuable insights. A 30 second conversation even more so.
I do believe most presentations I've seen could've been an email or an article. So I guess I agree with you?
Yeah, I really should have said that in my original post. Most presentations could have been a one pager, and any presentation worth sitting through the slides aren't worth having.
I don't really agree that a recording is always better than the slides. Slides are a text medium, and as such can be searched. You can also go through them much, much faster than through a recording (even if you can listen at 2x). If you're just looking for something specific, slides can be much better.
And sometimes you need to get the whole experience. And then the recording is much better.
But when someone specifically asks for slides, it just feels like a dick move to say "you don't want the slides, rewatch the whole presentation instead".
Sometimes you're just looking for the link on slide 45, the pithy problem description on slide 5, or, y'know, you just want to quickly go through the main points again.
It's only when you read the transcript of pretty much any presentation or podcast that you realise how superficial most are and how low the information density actually is.
Yes?
A video of the presentation is pretty much always better than just the slides. Even if you got the slides you'd have to click through them to find the one you were looking for. Your argument could just as easily be phrased:
"What do you expect people to do with that? Click through and read every slide?"
And it would make about as much sense as the original argument (none).
I've had considerable practice at reading. Learned it at a young age, and I got to be pretty good at it over the years. I can get through a slide deck much faster reading it than watching a presentation.
Thank you for pointing out that watching the presentation and clicking through the slides takes you just as long. I assumed most people were at my level of reading speed. It must've been hard coming forward like that. I'm sorry I made you go through that. In the future I will check my privilege.
And since you're often expected to hand over the slides afterwards, I try to find a middle ground. The slide will have more than 5 words, but hopefully not too many. Pictures/graphs help with this.
Then while presenting the visual you have the bullets of the next slide in your presenter's view, and you can just skip that slide during the presentation. Then, when people ask for the slides they will indeed get all they want.