The Presentation Slide Fit-Words-in-a-Tweet Rule

At every conference I attend there’s at least one presentation with slides that contain dozens of words. Inevitably, the presenter mumbles something to the audience like “you probably can’t read this” and continues right on. Whenever this happens I cringe and immediately think of Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint. Well, after this most recent conference, and seeing another slide with unbearably small words cluttering the screen, I came up with another rule:

All words on a presenter-led slide need to fit in a single tweet.

Now, there is a major qualifier included in there: presentation slides delivered live before a group should follow this rule whereas slides that are designed to be handouts should have much more information. If a presenter is taking the audience through his or her slide deck, each slide should have no more than 140 characters, just like a tweet. There’s elegance in brevity. Audience members should focus on the presenter, not read the extensive text on the slide.

What else? What do you think of the presentation slide fit-words-in-a-tweet rule?