I’ve complained to my colleagues about terrible PowerPoint presentations on many occasions; the people who use the generic stock slides, pass out printed handouts with the contents of the slides, and read the slide text word for word, as if it was a telepromoter.
I know many of you will chime in with “word, brother”, or something to that effect. Still, those that do so are probably in the minority; a very small minority, it seems. At a recent planning and zoning workshop I attended, most of the presentations were PowerPoint presentations of this ilk, and I felt like I was the only one in the audience who was bored stiff with them. Most people seemed to pay close attention, fixated on the screen, turning the pages of their handouts as a group, and even taking notes, even though the presenter was just reading the damn slides word-for-word with no additional commentary.
To those among the crowd, why do you find such presentations ao engrossing and fascinating? I’d really like to know. Does my ADD color my impression of such presentations? To those who offer such presentations to the public – and admit it, there’s probably many Dopers that do so on a regular basis – why do you prefer this style of presentation? Have you found it receives a positive response from the audience?
Don’t be dense; they’re writing shopping lists, or cleverly scanned limericks of the special circle of hell for people who read their powerpoint slide presentations word-for-word.
Of course you are correct. Good business writing is rare in all cases; with PowerPoint, most folks don’t even seem to realize that their slides need to support a narrative thread.
In some ways, I make a living figuring out how to straighten out my colleague’s PPT presentations…
I make Powerpoints like this, but I don’t deliver them like this. My slides are usually sparse, with either a diagram or molecular structure/scheme (chemistry student), or a bulleted list of short phrases. White background, black text, no transitions or sounds. I usually pass out a copy of the slides with the lines on the side for notes.
My delivery of the slides consists of making references to the things printed on them, but mainly using them as an organization tool.
I don’t think anyone enjoys them. However when the presentation contains important info for school or business it is helpful to get paper copies and then take notes accordingly. When our sales figures and incentive’s are tossed up there, I’d better pay attention or I’m liable to not get paid!
I’ve never figured out the attracton to presentation software at all. It all comes out looking like an old-fashioned “outline of your talk” written on some restaurant’s paper place mat.
Confine the audio-visual shenanigans to things that truly illustrate the points being made. If you want people to have an outline of the talk you gave, type it up, xerox it, and hand it out. (Or email it to them).
Of course you’re right - but there is the dilemma of whether the presentation materials need to function / be understandable on a standalone basis. If a slide doesn’t have a narrative thread and just had supporting data on it, it won’t standalone. I will sometimes have two versions - the presentation version which is sparse and a handout version which as more text on it.
Again, presentations are meant to confer data - so folks take notes. Often, the presentation is so poorly structured so the audience can’t tell what data is most relevant to them so they take even more notes.
There is a real skill to presentation writing. The big management consulting firms spend millions of dollars teaching their newbies how to make compelling arguments supported by PPT - it is just not clear how much of that training sinks in…
Hey, I already explain things. How hard can it be?
I’m putting together a presentation for next year. Can you point me to some resources explaining it? What’s the difference between good presentation writing and writing a nice technical manual with numbered steps and all? Should the slides merely illustrate key points of the underlying presentation, then?
I agree with you. I find PowerPoint very narrow and linear in a way that imposes information rather than being responsive to the discussion. My teaching style is more interactive and Socratic. However, the same lesson plan gets higher ratings when I do it on a PowerPoint. I can only assume this means that the students somehow don’t believe that I already generated ideas in response to my own questions unless the later slide proves that I thought about the lesson beforehand. I try to have a short set of points on the slide, but converse and tell stories related to, but not on, the slide.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, I believe, reported a while ago that using PowerPoint amplifies the instructor’s ratings–instructors who already get pretty good reviews are rated higher if they use it; those who get poor reviews are rated even lower.
ETA: The OP. I agree with the OP. I do not splice pornographic images into my lessons. However, I have already thought about Fight Club today for different reasons involving soup.
Community college teachers suffer from this disease at an abnormally high (for college teachers) rate–reading right off the PowerPoint slide, that is. My two music history teachers have been the worst, by far. My rock history teacher a couple of years ago was at least interesting about it, expanding on the points on the slide with anecdotes, more information, etc. My jazz history teacher is just awful about it, though. I mean, you can tell he could really be an interesting teacher if he put his mind to it, but his PowerPoint slides are generally in full sentence/paragraph format, and he just reads right off them. Even worse, you only get the PowerPoint slides for a few minutes during each class–the rest of the time he just puts on Ken Burns’ documentary on jazz, pausing it every once in a while to show an obscure live concert video, tell an amusing anecdote from his life in Jazz World, or lead a class discussion about a particular song or period in jazz history. Granted, the anecdotes and the class discussions are great, but some days you walk out thinking, “You know, it would’ve been cheaper to just buy the DVD box set…”
This is the mark of a really, really crappy public speaker.
I don’t–a boring presentation won’t be made interesting by duplicating it on Powerpoint slides. If the speaker does pass out slides, however, I will read along, because I can read more quickly than the speaker can speak, and then I can zone out and think about next weekend’s football games or my next SDMB post until the speaker moves on to the next slide. I would probably look engrossed to someone watching me.
Most of us aren’t good enough public speakers to engage an audience via the spoken word alone; Powerpoint allows one to mix sight and sound. Furthermore, the slides function as notes for the speaker; if you don’t display the “notes” on the screen, you have to stay behind a lectern as you speak, which feels confining to people who aren’t used to it. (Or you have to master your material so well that you don’t need notes, which isn’t always practical given the number of tasks foisted on us at work.)
Many times two different people will “write” and deliver a presentation. My bosses sometimes demand that I write presentations for them. It’s difficult to do this without Powerpoint.
The technique is of course misused; most people are poor public speakers, and do it seldom enough that it isn’t worthwhile for their management to invest in the substantial training necessary to improve.
PowerPoint is a good way to organize thoughts. Bad PowerPoint is when you read the slides. I don’t think anyone really liked bad PowerPoint presentations, but they usually are required to sit through them and end up taking notes to help remember.
And it’s not hard to make good presentations.
How to make a good PowerPoint presentation:
6 x 6 rule: no more than six bullet points of no more than six words each.
Don’t read the slides; your audience is already doing that. Expand on them.
Don’t cover every point. Your audience is already doing that.
The smaller the chunks of information, the better.
How to make a very good PowerPoint presentation.
Do not use any of the standard slides except for the “Heading Only” format.
Make the heading a complete sentence.
Insert a single graphic that illustrates the point of the sentence. It can be text as long as the text is an example instead of an explanation.
If you need bullet points, use only one or two, very short (1-3 words). Make them less prominent than the graphic example.
Since I grew up making slides using primitive things like the Bell Labs macro packages, I have to make up for iffy slides with an up presentation. It works, because I fill the room at conferences.
Still, I have data that the OPs assumption is wrong. We collect rating cards on presentations at the conference I’m involved with, and those with boring talks get low ratings. Some people produce really great talks with all kinds of animation, and they get high ratings.
In the old days, of 35 mm slides, the program committee reviewed them and recommended changes, but the biggest complaints we got were on poor slide quality. Now we still review them, and can change them ourselves if they violate the standards, and we get very few complaints. Nothing we can do about boring speakers, though.
The biggest problems in the past - figures that were too busy, slides too crammed and too wordy, poor color choices that made text invisible in large rooms. Pretty easy to fix, actually.
People make dull Powerpoint presentations because Microsoft Powerpoint makes it easy to make dull presentations. It’s actually a significant issue, which has been implicated in everything from sclerotic management to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Basically, Powerpoint pushes you into presenting information in linear soundbites, even when the material really doesn’t lend itself to that style of presentation. It’s led businesses to develop plans in discrete, bite-sized chunks, and may even be affecting the cognitive development of students.
I’m a huge fan of PowerPoint. I’ve put them together for various talks and presentations. But before you lynch me, here’s why:
[ul]
[li]I use them for visual impact. One presentation I did on obscenity law had “fuck” in large red letters against a royal-blue background. I also use graphics to break it up a little and to demonstrate what I’m talking about. There’s nothing like showing a photo of Janet Jackson’s décolletage to keep the audience’s attention. [/li][li]It’s very easy to embed audio, useful for the occasional talk I do on the history of radio. I can talk about Alan Freed until I’m blue in the face, but if I let the audience hear a clip from one of his shows, they come away with a better sense of what I’m talking about. Ditto for, say, Murrow or a clandestine broadcast. Why tell when you can show?[/li][li]I have no idea if Opal uses PowerPoint or not.[/li][/ul]
I also use notes extensively so I’m not just reading the slides. And I’ve been known to use a slide as a jumping-off point to tell a relevant story.
elmwood, you are far from alone. In an online survey with with over 600 respondents being asked what annoyed them about Power Point Presentations, 62% said they were annoyed by the speaker reading the slides to them.
I use powerpoint for art history lectures, so, oh, about 85-150 slides of big images, with just short captions, and sometimes maps and diagrams or quicktime 360 vr things inside buildings, and my notes are on the 'presenter tools" section but inaccessible to the audience since they’re sort of in order but freeform prompts. So it’s . . . epic? I guess it’s on a “power user” scale. My presentations wind up around 40 Mb and up. So when I see PPT lectures for other purposes with, like, 5 slides and just colorful text (with drop shadows!) that someone’s reading off, I wonder “why did you bother?” I guess I’ve seen a good number of PPT presentations of which I wondered why they existed at all.
