In English grammar, quotation marks (a.k.a. inverted commas) are commonly used in many written materials as a way to identify a conversation or quote one’s saying. Another function of quotation marks is to keep the words of one speaker from becoming confused with those of some other speakers. Now, I’m not discussing further about how to use quotation marks – The main thing is about using them to enhance your PowerPoint (PPT) presentations.
Here are some ideas of using quotation marks to display the following points:
- Mission statement or value that your company or product has to offer
- Sales target or sales goals
- Imperative or a strong statement that no one cannot disagree
If you have a slide which has a short message to convey, insert a related picture as the background of the slide.
Fig.1 Putting quotation marks around an italicized short message
Fig.2 Non-italic short message without any quotation marks
For example, use the quotation marks on default italicized Calibri font for this quote – “Think out of the box”. Definitely, you have to insert a picture of a box as the layout of the slide. Most viewers tend to focus on italicized text with the quotation marks – as if it’s a form of conversation.
Most books – fiction and non-fiction books have quotation marks around direct quotations so that it makes the contents livelier. It also applies on your PowerPoint presentation in which putting quotation marks on your short message (or direct quotation) can be livelier than one that doesn’t have any quotation marks.
Is it necessary to insert related picture when put quotation marks around a direct quotation?
The answer is – No. You can use quotation marks on a direct quotation even if your slides have no pictures at all! You can create a template to display your direct quotation such as your mission statement, goals and important facts. Like a normal PowerPoint – it has a title (without any quotation marks) and the content (which is italicized and enclosed with quotation marks).
Fig.3 PPT slide template with text enclosed with quotation marks
Fig.4 Sample of a mission statement in a PPT slide
Fig.5 Sample of a sales goal in a PPT slide
You can see that the message displayed on your slides tend to look less monotonous with quotation marks. In fact, you’ll use less time in preparing your slides as looking for suitable pictures would be time consuming – that’s a great thing to boost your productivity.
There’s another way to improve your productivity for preparing your PPT slides. It’s a total faux pas to copy all the contents directly from your report or any written materials and paste all of them into your slides. No one would really want to read excessive texts on your slides within short period of time.
If you prefer using this method of preparing your slides (especially for those who refer to their slides while they are giving out their presentation), you can use quotation marks to emphasize important lines (or phrases) from the lengthy texts on your slide. Play around with the font-size and colors to highlight the important lines and make the remaining texts less significant. In other words, it’s like letting your audience what you want them to see although the texts displayed are a bit lengthy.
Fig.6 Worst PPT slide that you’d ever seen
Fig.7 Sprucing lengthy texts up with quotation marks
Lastly, you can make use of quotation marks on motivational or leadership quotes in your PPT slides.
Fig.8 Putting quotation marks around the motivational quote
In this case, you use “Steve Jobs’ template” to display your selected quote. Choose a dark colored gradient fill (preferable black or dark blue) for the slide layout and light-colored and shadowed text for the selected quote. For instance, I would use black colored gradient layout and white colored shadowed text for the motivational quote in order to make the quote more appealing to your audience.
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