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Submitted by Tom Vradenburg on July 12, 2022, at 09:07

"Your audience will have eyes—and especially ears—for you only!" This may be an unexplored root cause of overly dense decks and people reading directly from them, rather than using them as notes to reinforce their spoken words. Public speaking takes (learnable) skills and confidence; not all of us have those attributes 'out of the box'. Inexperienced speakers may be uncomfortable in the spotlight.
The other root cause of dense decks is the misplaced desire to 'cram everything in', failing to consider listeners'/readers' ability or desire to absorb all the detail. Unfortunately, I've seen that tendency far too often—in decks and every other genre of document I have ever worked on in government.
”I’m going to make a long speech, because I’ve not had the time to prepare a short one.”—Winston Churchill