The young man stepped to the microphone, asked the audience a question to draw them into his topic, and then delivered an opening story. “Perfect,” I thought. “Nice opening.” For the first 20 minutes of his presentation, his points were supported by nicely-designed PowerPoint slides and anchored with word pictures and stories. His structure was flawless. For me, the problem came during the next 20 minutes. Structurally, he followed the same pattern as the first half. But by now, my brain was exploding. By the time he delivered points five, six and seven, I was drowning in information.

What could he have done differently? In my opinion, it would have been better to stick to about three points and spend his time expanding them. Is there something magic about three points? Not necessarily – although it does seem to work well and be memorable. If the material warrants, two points or four points are probably fine. But seven points in 40 minutes was just too much and prevented my mind from retaining portions of his information – all of which was quite good.

Narrow your information to about three points for a 30 to 45 minute speech, develop those, and you will make your presentation more memorable for your audience.