In constructing Powerpoint slides for this class:

Avoid text of all sorts -- especially text that is "sentence like" -- in favor of pictures or well-labeled diagrams. If you must use words, use only essential "key words" to serve as prompts for what you will say.

Do not even think about including bullets in your presentation. The impulse to include bullets is itself diagnostic that your content is too verbose. Repent of your sins, and remove extraneous words. You will find that your need to fire bullets thereby abates.

Do not use dashes, boxes, cute little check marks, pointing index fingers or any bullet-substitute that is supposed to alert the audience that a new "item" is starting.

Use spacing between items, instead. "Hanging indents" are a good alternative, where the first word of a multi-line item is slightly to the left of the first word in subsequent lines of that same item. Mostly, though, if you need more than one line to write the words for one thought, you are with greater than 99% probability using too many words.

Avoid serifed fonts. These look unavoidably pixelated and crappy on even "high" resolution video projectors.

Experience has shown that most of you will save at least one round on ppt feedback from me if you
remove approximately 90% of the words in your first draft before showing it to me. I am not kidding. (Note in this regard that the compositions of CN530 panels are NOT a good guide for your talks. The CN530 stuff is intended to serve as an archive, to be studied "off-line," often from printed copies, and so makes some compromises on what would be better Powerpoint form for a lecture that is only intended to be listened to.)

Start your talk by describing a problem area or a hypothesis in as compelling a way as possible. Why should anybody CARE to listen to you for the next N minutes?

On your second or (third) panel, avoid the SIN OF USING GENERIC WORDS. The following words should not appear anywhere in your presentation: outline, background, motivation, results, discussion. If you absolutely must "outline", go ahead and do it -- it will be obvious enough that you will not have to print the word "outline". Instead of printing the word "background," GIVE the background. Instead of saying "motivation," MOTIVATE. Any words that appear printed on your second panel should be specific to the background of YOUR presentation. A rule of thumb to diagnose this situation is the following: Any panel that could equally well occur in someone else's presentation should not be in yours.

End with a panel that says "Thanks for your attention" or "Thanks" or "The End" or some such thing.

Use no fonts smaller than 14pt, and that only in an "emergency." Overprint smaller text from a scanned figure with native ppt fonts if possible. Otherwise, just draw a "blank" box over it to hide it. The idea is that anything that cannot be easily read by someone in the back of the room should be removed.

Avoid punctuation of all sorts, including colons, semi-colons, commas, periods, and (especially) PARENTHESES.
Let

spacing

font style, and

color variations do the work that punctuation symbols do in written text.

Citations, like Smith, 2002, should be set off to the side, in a smaller font or different color, so as not to "run together" with text or graphics. You do NOT need to use parentheses for any part of the citation or for the whole citation.

Practice your talk out loud -- more than once. Make sure that it can be delivered in the time allotted.

Finally, with apologies to Bill F. I would like to share the following . . .
arbitrary preferences, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing:

I have a theory that Powerpoint panels in which the text appears lighter than a dark background are vestigial organs from an earlier epoch of human evolution, one in which "slide" (and here I do not mean video) projectors threw so few photons at a screen that there was no alternative to turning off all the lights in an otherwise dark room, and hoping that the little illumination that was permitted through the text-defining transparent sections of acetate or glass on an otherwise virtually opaque slide could somehow be discerned by the dark-adapted scotopic (that means much-more-sensitive-to-light-than-occurs-during-daytime-aka-photopic vision) visual systems of the audience.

For generic ppt panels, please consider using dark text on a light background. Doing so will align you with an ancient and noble tradition (e.g. clay tablets, in which the text appears darker, because fewer photons enter and, more importantly, exit the indentations than the surrounding surface, or the Gutenberg printing press, as we "late-comers" in the West like to refer to that most wondrous invention of Ancient China, moveable type), to say nothing of the basic concept of "ink," and help us to forget the days when when (real) slide projectors were underpowered and when Thomas Edison sought to prove the "superiority" of DC over AC by maneuvering to have executions via the "electric chair" using the latter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair