Reducing Bullet Points and On-screen Text

Reducing Bullet Points and On-screen Text Posted Monday, September 06, 2010 at 6:54 PM

Add to Favorites

Reducing Bullets Points and On-screen Text

One of the most common questions e-learning designers ask is around how to reduce the amount of bullets in their courses. And it's a great question, because when used appropriately, bullet points offer an effective way to organize content and increase readability. So, why are bullet points so misused?

One reason is they're easy, right? You’re in a hurry, your storyboard is already developed – the bullet points are practically begging you to copy-paste them to the slide. So how can you begin using more supporting visuals in place of bullet points?

Here are a few ways to reduce bullet points:

Rewrite as a question and allow the narration to answer the question
Shorten bullet points from full sentences to a phrase or even a word
Use one bullet point per slide
Use an image, graphic, chart or animation in place of each bullet

The following screencasts demonstrate some before and after examples.

And Part 2:

Here's an example of the storyboard used for this course

5 comments so far

kimberly peete

4 posts

Posted Tuesday, April 05, 2011 at 2:54 PM

So simple yet so effective! Thanks

David Anderson

1,567 posts

Posted Tuesday, April 05, 2011 at 3:10 PM

Thanks Kimberly! And if you ever run into some content or a topic that doesn't easily work with this technique, please share it and I'll be more than happy to work it out with you.

Tri Hue Nguyen

3 posts

Posted Sunday, December 04, 2011 at 9:14 AM

Thanks to Tom Kuhlmann, I have worked through this very interesting example. Unfortunately, there is no extinguisher clip art available, so I had to use the image. Tom wrote in one of his article, one needs to practice, practice, practice in order to be more productive in the course design. it is so true:)

Thank you very much.

Regards,

Tri Huê

Rachel Leigh

108 posts

Posted Monday, February 06, 2012 at 12:56 PM

Hi David,

This"before and after" example is very effective, especially when you're doing course redesign, taking an existing PowerPoint to transform it into elearning (hopefully not just "transferring" it). It's also useful to show these two tutorials to people without a background in design and development who may be skeptical about changing much on an existing PP file. Essentially, these tutorials show what "design work" is. Would it be possible for you to create a follow up tutorial on the last minute of the second tutorial explaining how you created the effects that you did? For example, how you created the shapes and a step by step explanation of how you set up the animations?

Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro

218 posts

Posted Monday, February 27, 2012 at 4:01 PM

I've always been fairly successful at reducing text, but the other ideas presented here are fantastic. Best part here for me, at this juncture in my learning, is the sample stdscreard and screen shots for how it would be used in this project. TX!