“It is astonishing that people have somehow managed to teach and to give talks for thousands of years without ‘presentation software’!” rails Edward Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University and a widely respected authority on information design. Tufte's main argument is that too often speakers use PowerPoint slides as placeholders for their thoughts rather than as visual aids to convey deeper meaning to the audience.
Bullet-point slides, in particular, become crutches for the speaker and can actually detract from the points the speaker intends to make, he contends. “The popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis,” Tufte says.
Tufte, who dispenses advice to graphic designers and others at his web site, (http://www.edwardtufte.com/), wrote an essay in the September issue of Wired magazine with the attention-grabbing headline: “PowerPoint is evil.” The text of the article isn't quite so condemning of the software. Tufte's beef is more about the way the product is commonly used.
“PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector,” he says in the article. “But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.”
All consideration about visual effects used during a speech or presentation, according to Tufte, should consider foremost: “What are the thinking-learning-understanding tasks that my displays and presentations are supposed to help with?” PowerPoint’s graphics feature too often tempts users to create fancy, colorful graphics that grab the eye but make the message incoherent, he says. “Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure,” he says.
“If the presentation is about strategic thinking or project planning, you will want to avoid the dreaded bullet list,” Tufte says. Bullet lists tend to oversimplify information and even mislead the audience with incomplete thoughts. (For a good example illustrating Tufte's point, visit http://www.norvig.com/, which features a parody of PowerPoint based on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.)
In business settings, a typical slide shows about 40 words, Tufte says, which is roughly eight seconds of reading material. With so little information per slide, “Audiences endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another,” he says. But, “visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side.”
Here are a few questions to test the effectiveness of your slides: Do they make sense when read outside of the context of the presentation? Are they logically organized? Are any of them misleading or incomplete? If so, consider rewriting or eliminating the offending slides. Remember, PowerPoint is a tool that is easily abused. Because PowerPoint slide shows are ubiquitous, the weaknesses of the medium often go unnoticed. Don't fall into that trap or you risk losing your audience.— PETER FABRIS
This
article originally appeared in ZweigWhite’s Revolutionary Marketing newsletter.