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From Slides to Stories: Teaching Better Visual Communication

Using the CARS Framework to Create Story-Driven Presentation Slides

  • Higher Education
  • Event
  • On-demand
  • Composition Lunch & Learn
  • Business Communication
  • 45 Minutes
  • On-Demand Video

Description

During this webinar, Dr. Patricia Harms first describes the CARS framework and explains how business communication instructors can use CARS to teach students how to design and analyze presentation slides. Workshop participants then get an opportunity to apply the CARS framework to sample investor slides from publicly traded companies to investigate how organizations are using full-sentence slide titles and carefully planned annotations to create stories at the individual slide level and at the deck level. Finally, participants discuss how to incorporate both old school approaches (like storyboarding) and newer strategies (like AI-powered tools) to help students learn how to create intentional, audience-centered, story-driven slides.

About Your Speaker

  • Patricia Harms -

    Patricia Harms

    Patricia Lynn Harms is a professor of Management and Corporate Communication and teaches written and oral communication. Her research interests are visual rhetoric, slide design and communicating with data; performance feedback; virtual teaching and learning; and business writing strategies and trends. In 2023, she received the Meada Gibbs Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award. She is the current Vice President for the Association for Business Communication (ABC), and previously, she served as the Southeastern U.S. Regional Vice President. She serves on the review board for Business and Professional Communication Quarterly and is also a member of the Management Communication Association. She received her PhD in rhetoric and professional communication and her MA in business and technical communication from Iowa State University, and her BSN from the University of Pennsylvania.