PowerPoint is the devil’s instrument, and when you use it, you risk becoming a musician in his demonic orchestra. All of us are required to give presentations in some form or fashion at various points in our careers. If you’d like to succeed in those efforts, there are three things you should never say when you’re presenting.
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I’ve witnessed my fair share of presentations (and given more of them than I care to count). I’ve personally made all of these mistakes at one point or another. I’ve also seen others make all of these mistakes, many times with ugly results. I’d like to spare all of you the same fate.
First, remember why you’re presenting in the first place. You’re likely either teaching or sharing information, or trying to influence someone to make a decision about something. You are not there to show off your wicked-awesome PowerPoint skillz that killz. To convey that information and influence that decision, you must get your point across clearly and concisely. Given those two purposes, be mindful of what you say and how you say it, as well as the information you use to make your case.
If you’d prefer to fail miserably instead, say or do any of the following three things:
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Comments
Respecting the Audience by Providing Context
Thanks for the article Mike. Too often in presentations the adult learner is not respected. The presentor gets up and goes through a snappy presentation; projector off. Then there is a clamoring for the slides by the audience. The presentor then walks out, maybe without leaving a trace that anything happened. Edward Tufte refers to this as disrespecting the audience.
In your article you discuss "turn to p.47..." for me this would be a relief. Now I have the ability to see the context from which your summary bullets are emerging, references you have used, etc. When we use powerpoint to share what is in a paper or what we have written in a book, we are choosing the "key points" for our audience. Another adult learner may read the same material lin context and add a point or two based on their experience and circumstances or have the ability to disagree with our assumptions. The fix for me is the for the presentor to advise their audience that they are being respected as adult learners and are being given far more than a set of slides so they can study the ideas in context. Tufte would probably say, "drop the PPT and just use the paper.
Edward Tufte shares your warnings on Power Point. Here is a good link where he discusses the "context" idea and a few others: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
Unfortuantely, we have dumbed it down to the point that some people would rather be fed some slides than actually read the material. As Tufte notes in the article, we have now moved to something even worse:
"Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something."
Best Regards,
Cliff
Spot on!
Good article Mike. Another one that just slays me is when someone (usually a new instructor) gets up and says "Well, I'm new at this..." or "Well, I'm really not the expert on this..." In most cases, the person will probably do a fine job, but why set the audience's expectations so low and kill your own credibility?
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