By JJ Bowman
Associate Editor
I do not need to pick this fight and risk alienating countless classmates just before graduation. Instead, I’ve bit my pen and nodded approvingly at your slides as I nodded off to sleep.
In reality, however, as soon as the lights dim and the student and professor finish the eight-minute transition between lecture and PowerPoint presentation, I want to take that pen from between my gritting teeth and slowly twist it through my open eyeball.
And, now, I must speak up. An overwhelming majority of college students have no clue how to deliver an effective presentation, as if all the lessons learned from Speech 180 faded away faster than the first bullet point of a PowerPoint slide.
Before I continue, let me state that I am not speaking of my professors. Their presentations are enlightening and thoughtful. Besides, they typically have more information to provide than just what they fill on a few slides. So, again, I say to all my professors, please do not take this as an assault on your teaching style. (That should cover me.)
The chief mistake students make when they employ PowerPoint is to place their entire speech on their slides. Back in Speech 180, we were taught to deliver our speeches extemporaneously. PowerPoint then became a backdrop to pound home the basic points of our interesting and well-prepared speeches.
Fast forward a few semesters and you can see PowerPoint utilized as projected note cards. How many students have you witnessed turn their backs to the class and read their slides verbatim? Am I the only one insulted by the suggestion that I’m too stupid to read sentence fragments on my own?
One can understand why a student would deliver a speech in this manner. Writing all the notes on PowerPoint provide a safety net for the speaker. However, in-class presentations are not exactly high-wire acts, but more like balancing on a curb.
College students are more adept at handling multiple stimuli than following along for more than four lines of recited text. For that reason, every medium from “NBC Nightly News” to “Fox Saturday Baseball” fetters information on the screen fewer than 10 words at a time.
Mr. Hughes pointed this out to me during my sophomore year U.S. History class in high school. He forced our entire class to deliver PowerPoint presentations during the year. He pounded simplicity, organization and conciseness into our malleable brains, and although I have no idea what subject I presented to the class, the lesson of delivering quality PowerPoint presentations stayed with me.
The PowerPoint-presenting college students should learn all the definite “No-no’s” of the craft as well. In his eight-page e-booklet “Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it),” marketing guru Seth Godin outlines some essential words of wisdom. Although he writes for a business audience, his advice applies just as much to a presentation on Marshall McLuhan’s global village as to one on fourth-quarter revenue projections.
“Make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them,” he writes. “Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true, not just accurate.”
In other words, scrap the bar graphs and the verbiage in place of an image that can say just as much.
Other rules of his include “never having more than six words on a slide, ever,” not using cheesy clip art, no dissolving, spinning, or other bizarrely disappearing text, and using sound from other places besides those Microsoft builds into the program.
I’d be happy to expound upon these suggestions over PowerPoint slides, but I wouldn’t want to bore you.
October 02, 2003