SEMINAR | Rethinking Slide Design in Scientific Presentation: The Assertion-Evidence Approach

Michael Alley
Associate Professor, Engineering Communication

A small, but growing, revolution is occurring in the way that scientists design their presentation slides. This revolution advocates alternatives (based on multimedia learning principles) that challenge PowerPoint’s default structure of a topic-phrase headline supported by a bullet list of subtopics. One such alternative is the assertion-evidence structure, in which a sentence headline states the main message of the slide. That message assertion is then supported not by a bullet list, but by visual evidence.