11: Presenting With PowerPoint
The author quotes some of the anti-evangelists of Microsoft PowerPoint, who have seen many very boring and bad presentations in which the speaker merely read to the audience from very badly conceived slides - giving them a jumble of information that never came to a firm point.
While some critics assert that PowerPoint should be banished altogether because it is being used very poorly, that's throwing away a presentation tool that has a great deal of power if used appropriately. The problem is that speakers don't know how to use it appropriately.
Bad Speakers Love PowerPoint
Nowadays, virtually every speech is accompanied by a slide show, built in PowerPoint (or Keynote, or some similar program). It's become so ubiquitous that people who are learning public speaking assume it's a must-have.
Amateur speakers like using slides because it gives the audience something to look at other than themselves, which helps alleviate one of the major obstacles to public speaking: fear of being the center of attention. Unfortunately, the audience pays so much attention to the slides that they ignore the speech.
Slides are also misused as a teleprompter: the speaker merely reads the slides to the audience rather than having to remember his speech. Of course, the audience can read the slides for themselves, and read the words faster than the speaker can say them.
If all you're going to do is read the slides to the audience, then just email them the presentation and save everyone's time.
Random bit: when you have every word on slides, the audience can tell when you got something wrong, because they compare what you are saying to the script on the screen.
Random bit: when you have every word on slides, you have no flexibility to change your speech to suit the audience's reaction. If they respond negatively to something you've said, you can't attempt to change course.
In business particularly, easy-to-use programs for creating slides is often used as a shortcut to save the time and expense of hiring a graphic designer to prepare information graphics. This is a problem because having a program to build slides doesn't make a person a graphic designer, any more than having a microphone makes them a virtuoso singer.
All of this considered, bad speakers are drawn to slideshow software for the wrong reasons - but that doesn't mean that they cannot be used well.
Random Tips for Slides
The author provides a smattering of advice from various sources:
- Simplify slides. Do not clutter them with verbiage, and do not be afraid of white space.
- Better still, create a slides that contain no words, only pictures or information graphics.
- For business presentations, particularly technical ones, deliver a report before the presentation to provide detail (EN: or cover the high points and provide the report afterward - just make sure they don't' get it coming in the door, or you will see them reading rather than listening)
- Don't feel the need to tell them everything in a slideshow. Doing a thorough job of presenting three key points is better than doing a poor job of presenting all seven.
More Random Tips
- One good use of slides is to provide images as visual metaphors, rather than literal depictions of the points in your speech. Let the images convey emotion - to be felt rather than read.
- A slideshow can depict characters and events in a story that you tell verbally. Research shows that people identify better with characters and remember stories if they have an image rather than having to imagine a character.
- When you have a narrative (events that happened, not necessarily a story), speak the narrative but use a slide to show only the final outcome, to be revealed at the end of the story.
- The slide at the end of a presentation usually remains visible when you leave the stage - use it to create a lasting impact. One example the author provides is to use a famous quote that relates to the desired final emotion.
Practical Examples
One example the author presents is Senator Al Gore, known as "Gore the Bore" because he was so monotone and elitist that he could not even win his home state in his 2000 bid for the presidential election. Yet his later speech on environmentalism (An Inconvenient Truth) was well received by audiences.
The difference, the author asserts, was the slides. Because Gore was a stoic and dispassionate man, he could not create an emotional impact on his audience with his voice or physical presence. Instead, he used a slideshow to accompany his speech, filled with stunning natural scenes and depressing views of pollution. It's believed that these pictures, not his monotonous droning on about scientific facts, is what enabled him to connect with audiences.
By contrast, Steve Jobs is a very energetic and charismatic speaker, who had little problem whipping up an audience of people where were inclined to fanatics. Even so, he used slides extensively (his iPhone launch speech used more than 100 slides in 90 minutes) - but each slide had a simple image, less than ten words of text, and a lot of empty space around both.
These slides are in stark contrast to most technical presentations, which present loads of information about the functions, features, and technical specifications of gadgets, so much so that the audience has the choice of either reading the slides or listening to the speaker. Moreover, such an information overload is intimidating. Steve Jobs used slides that are simple, elegant, and easy to understand - the same qualities that drive loyalty to his company's products.
Conclusions
The conclusion reiterates the main thrust: slides are not bad, but the way people use them is often quite horrible.
Remember that a presentation is a speech, and that slides are merely a prop that the speaker uses as necessary to make his point.
The speaker's voice is not an audio track for a slideshow, it should be the center of attention.
Slides that convey emotions rather than information are best.
Information graphics can depict the relationship between pieces of information, but should be simple enough to be understood at a glance.