Page 108 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

WhY MUST I gIvE A MEMORABLE PRESENTATION? 97

Who’s Protecting the Children?
• Senator Charles Schumer of New York proposed banning the suspect baby
bottles outright.
• Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us, and CvS all announced plans to phase out polycar-
bonate bottles. Some companies have adopted BPA-free plastic.
• Yet most businesses stuck with BPA products -- at least partly because they
don't have a good substitute. Nearly all of the 130 billion food and beverage
cans made in the United States each year are still lined with a BPA resin. The
alternative called Oleoresin, is more expensive, has a shorter shelf life, and
can't be used for acidic foods like tomatoes.
• Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey has proposed an overhaul of the
whole system. In May 2008, he introduced the kid-Safe Chemical Act. The
Act would reverse the burden of proof on chemicals, requiring manufacturers
to demonstrate their safety in order to keep them in commerce. The E.U.
passed a similar law in 2006, as did Canada in 1999. (Canada has banned BPA
in baby bottles.)
• The National Toxicology Program advised "concerned parents" to reduce their
use of canned foods; use BPA-free baby bottles; and opt for glass, porcelain, or
stainless-steel containers, particularly for hot foods and liquids.
Figure 7.6 Wordy slide

settings. When you open up a blank presentation and begin working with
a slide, the bullet points are right there for you to use. How convenient.
Are we wrong, or are we not sentient beings? Just because a program is
set up with defaults, we are not compelled to use the defaults. Instead, we
encourage you to figure out the point of each slide and to draw by hand—
don’t worry, we use stick figures—what you want the slide to look like.
Alternatively, you can think about images that might evoke an emotional
connection to the topic at hand. Once you’re satisfied, open PowerPoint
and try to force the program to recreate the drawing for you, or insert the
image for you.
In Figure 7.7, we revised the slide from Figure 7.6. Less is more. The
slide in Figure 7.7 would make an emotional connection with any audi-
ence. The audience would much rather look at a picture of an adorable
baby and listen to you provide the details. What they would dislike is
listening to you read the content from the slide in Figure 7.6.
Audiences don’t just dislike wordy slides; they also dislike slides with
tables and graphs that have too much information. The audience cannot
reasonably process complex tables and graphs and listen to you. Again,
if you remember that you are the message, you will limit your tables
and graphs to images that can be processed quickly so your audience