Powerpoint
There’s been some interesting online discussions of presentations of late, inspired by Edward Tufte’s anti-Powerpoint screed (see this article in Wired, PowerPoint is Evil for a summary.
I find myself far from convinced by Tufte’s arguments, although I think that Powerpoint is often used badly. But I bet that will change, and this article by “Doc Searls”, It’s the story, stupid makes a number of good points
In a fairly colorful way, Searls presents a number of useful maxims, nearly all of which I agree with and which I will freely paraphrase (hey, you can read the article yourself).
1. Begin with the end (both knowing where you want to end up and stating your conclusions at the start of the talk, so the audience knows where you want to end up).
2. Talks are personal—you need to tell anecdotes, expose who you are, and establish a physical presence in the room (he has a nice example of how Rush Limbaugh does this over the radio).
3. Talks are stories—in the Joseph Campbell, Hero with a thousand faces sense. With characters, problems, and movement toward a resolution. Our hero begins with certain ideas and goals, tries to find a way to validate them, implement them, or whatever. Faces certain obstacles along the way (don’t leave this out of your talk), and finally triumphs!
4. Talk from headlines, not headings. What’s the difference? In a word, verbs. Headlines make statements (like the classic headline in the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette—“Local man charged with three batteries”). Headings don’t (“Crime report”).
5. Use graphics. Now that there are such great online resources for finding images, such as the Google image search, or (my favorite) the Library of Congress American Memory collection, and the National Archives, there’s really no excuse not to include graphics in nearly every slide.
6. Use numbers to make lists memorable—i.e., “I’m going to talk about 3 features of Chinese mathematics lessons that differ from their U.S. counterparts”
7. Give examples, cite sources, include quotes. You don’t want to read long passages from someone’s work out loud in front of a big group if you can avoid it, and I’m dubious about whether people really remember citations, but I’ve noticed that a number of colleagues here seem to notice their absence.
[He also recommends working from an outline. Personally, I don’t find that particularly useful]
Here are a couple of other recommendations of my own:
8. Give the audience a job to do. For example, if you’re showing a video, tell them, “I’m going to show you X and I want to you notice Y.” You want to break through the passivity of the audience and have a conversation.
9. Slides are cheap, so make a lot of them. A new slide recaptures wandering attention and helps you and your audience to stay on task.
10. Pacing is important, and so is navigation. Try to have each slide take about the same amount of time, and if possible include a navigation slide that will show the audience where they are in the talk.
11. But, contra #10, think about what you can do to break up the flow (Searls makes this point). This can include showing a video in the middle of the talk, or giving an example, or telling a story, or something. This recaptures interest and attention.
December 20th, 2003 at 1:43 am
“Think of your presentation as a series of newspaper stories, each the length of one slide. Without room for long copy, only three things matter. They’re the same three things you get from a 3-second read of the lead story in a newspaper: headline, picture and caption.”
This is an interesting idea (and certainly far from Tufte’s data-rich urgings).
The strength of that strategy is that it doesn’t allow for text-heavy speaker’s notes slides, which seems to poison every graduate student’s presentations (i’m guilty too).
Lately i’ve been thinking of some guidelines that will help me focus on the presentation rather than the slides…
I’ll only use a slide if it has one of the following functions: – visual representation of data (charts, tables, etc) – embedded multimedia (video) – visually portray the structure of the presentation
...I think everything else in a presentation can be spoken.
December 23rd, 2003 at 1:18 pm
One problem with Powerpoint as used is that slides serve two functions—as a guide to the speaker and as a guide to the audience. “Presentation mode” in the newer versions of Powerpoint allows one to differentiate these roles, although even fast laptops have problems when video clips are involved and there’s no easy way to structure the speaker’s view.
There used to be writers’ tools (e.g., something called “Writer’s workbench”) that would show different views of a piece of writing, including (I think), just the first and last sentences of each paragraph to facilitate checking continuity (I never saw this in action, so I don’t know how well it worked).
It might be interesting to set up a slide show where you saw each slide for 3 seconds and then it flashed on to the next one. I often do something like manually that before I give a talk, and I think it does help in identifying the main points and getting them fixed firmly in your head.