The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]
inf.ed.ac.uk
inf.ed.ac.uk
I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images projected for a fraction of a second one after the other.
But no one has the patience for my storytelling style. Congratulations if you got this far, most people gave up if they didn’t grok my point in the first two sentences.
Yes slideware is ugly and low information and boring and insulting to the audience, but some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.
I hate PowerPoint but bullet points could be quite information dense. They lose effectiveness past 6 bullets due to readability reasons, but I still prefer them over fluffy low signal prose. I think at the end of the day, it all depends on the writer. I got to the end of your comment just fine. But I cannot and will not get to the end of a corporate jargon filled report or ppt.
That caste likes to say, "I have people that do that for me."
Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video
Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.
Consider the visual rebus, for example, which is open to interpretation and depends on commonality of context in both producer and consumer, contrasted to a rigorous argument, which depends onoy on commonality of (technical) jargon.
Video ends up conveying information thanks to narration, while the visuals assuage boredom. Like an Adam Curtis documentary: it's essentially an essay read out, with clips and music overlaid to keep the audience from realising they're told, rather than shown, the argument.
Having the talking points as aides memoire on screen is nice in that it charts the course of the argument, but the map is not the territory, and we end up with significant information loss and knowledge gap.
I think that moving from the message in itself to its summation (i.e. from text to bullets) creates a knowledge divide between the producer (who knows more) to the consumer (who has access to less and can only divine the rest).
It's pretty bourgie IMO.
Even still I couldn't quite get the result I wanted
Image link
https://chatgpt.com/share/67769bef-537c-800f-90ac-35a44747f0...
Wow, do you really equate long prose with "generated content"? Long prose is novels, deep non-fiction books, long letters, and much more. You can like them or not. In comparison "generated content" is sugar-coated garbage, like way too many social media posts. There was never any point in reading such "generated content".
My comment was about "utility" texts (this is a context of this discussion, I suppose) - my prediction is that we are going to write shorter and more condensed texts to avoid overhead of LLMs use in generating and summarising text.
The idea is that good writing actually makes you think clearer (both writer & reader); it’s not just a nice to have.
What I am saying is not that good writing is useless - rather that good writing is _hard_ and people are lazy. There is way more bad writing than good in the world. Bad writing will be replaced by LLMs which does not make sense because it is still bad - and useless.
Good writing is going to stay but since it is hard it is (still) going to be rare.
In the end my hope is that bad (and useless) writing is going to be replaced by short, dense and useful format.
Of course - this begs the question: what constitutes good writing? Pretty good estimation is that a good writing is the one that is - generally speaking - as information dense as possible (ie. there is nothing you can take away from it without loosing some important information). And we are back to square one - it does not make sense to write anything longer than necessary :)
As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.
I've never been able to articulate why I couldn't stand Wired so succinctly! Thankyou
No matter how often I explain that 'people can either listen to what you are saying, or read the slide - pick one' - it doesn't really sink in
Anyways, I'm not saying this excuses the quality of most of these things but imagine how much effort you'd put into a Ted Talk versus how much you'd put into a 30 minute meeting when you may only have a few days notice. Most meeting topics are simply boring, it's work, or someone else's domain of work, shouldn't need a ton of narrative fluff to make it digestible, and honestly most powerpoints I see in work in the last decade or so are adequate enough for their purposes. I just stopped being critical of people's powerpoint and storying telling skills long ago and try to focus on the discussion/content being made and what I need to take away/double click on.
Becoming good takes a lot of hard work, lot of redoing of stuff. Just like becoming good at soccer is more than playing games. Many successful YouTubers have learned it's hard work to make good videos.
Like Penn&Teller said: The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.
but you have to practice the right way.
the terrible, long-winded, confusing presentations you've seen were most likely done by somebody that sees a presentations as merely "talking in front of a group" so their practice would be focused on memorizing lines/facts that want to say. they may sound polished, but it's not necessarily going to be good.
in order for your practice to actually help, you need to go through your presentation while maintaining a strong sense of empathy for the audience. you need to fight a constant battle against the 'curse of knowledge' and force yourself to honestly evaluate what you're doing from the perspective as a first-time listener.
As someone that has tried to write a decision paper before rather than a PowerPoint deck, I found the main challenge was engagement (i.e. encouraging people to read it is a challenge, while a powerpoint can be walked through together).
I could present a spreadsheet, but that only addresses the financials or numbers and won't address the business context.
And if you go into a board meeting empty handed to talk about a large investment - good luck!
I think it's probably a case of horses-for-courses: Sometimes PowerPoint is a great format, other times it might not be, and like any format it can either be used well or poorly. The issue in the Columbia example wasn't PowerPoint per-se, it was that the managers weren't clear in their communication.
And while bullet points are poor in some ways - they are great in others. Distilling ideas down and making sure your list is MECE is part of clear communication and thinking.
I'd add that you tend to need a presentation and a leave-behind format. And, in the real world, it's mostly not realistic to expect people to create both formats. Mostly. I've actually given a presentation and wrote a book on the topic. But I'm not going to do that routinely.
The presenter gave us both the Tufte book and a detailed handout.
The idea is that you use the PowerPoint like you would an overhead projector, details that would otherwise be on slides are better as a handout that people can read/annotate as they want.
This was part of a summer REU and focused on academic talks, and this all falls apart in a remote setting - but I think there are ways to capture the essence of this style on Zoom.
It's basically an ode to clear, cutter-less, data visualization. Check out this timetable [2] (horizontal lines: stations, vertical lines: hours, diagonal lines: trains), and your mind will be blown. It's compact, it gives you all the information you need, it can be navigated by your grandma (or your granddaughter) and it likely shows more information than most digital or paper-based system you have ever met, in a smaller format.
[1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/book/the-visual-display-of-quant... [2] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/0*8zW...
That said, I think it is possible my refusal to do cheeky ppt slides with smart art and fill them with graphs of real data instead has stunted my career growth into management.
This is the culmination of his response [2] to a question [3] in the Q&A period of a talk on his book tour for Seveneves [4]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE#t=40m20s
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE#t=38m46s
I don’t actually think PowerPoint is responsible for all this, I think it’s just people are often too lazy to create more structure and depth at the right time, and transition to something else.
You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make:
* Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of slides often have a single sentence, image, chart, or code block. Importantly, those slides carry no meaning/story by themselves - you can't look at that deck without the talk itself.
* Handouts, or material to send over email, etc., in which the slides themselves are a thing (you might not be there to talk about them, or you can expand some of it as a follow-up). Slides are tightly packed with information, which needs to be carefully organized. They're usually bottom-line up-front (google BLUF), with on-slide info organized in pyramid fashion (google MBB slide structure).
(Edit to add: people often want to reuse the same slide deck for both uses, compromise on it, and end up with the worst combination. Nobody wants to do things twice over).
Diametrically apart, optimized for different things; if you're skilled at making those, can be super-useful. Trouble is, it's a skill that very few people are tought how to do. We expect people to be able to create and deliver a presentation without teaching them how to do it.
So what most non-experts end up doing, is what's in the linked book excerpt:
* pick a template you like
* add a bunch of bullet points where each bullet point is a paragraph of text
* fumble about with creating a chart that's only obvious to you (visualisation is a different skill in itself!)
* read the slides, slowly, while having your backs turned to the audience
Yeah, that's torture.
But it's not caused by powerpoint, same like spam is not caused by email. It's not because slides are inherently a worse format than articles or books (different, yes, and not for the same thing). It's just that people legit don't know better.
Sure there is: https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
Powerpoint presentations have a distinct content and character arising from the medium. The style of powerpoint is:
* 3-5 Bullet points in a big font
* With indents if at all possible
* Prepared and researched in advance, nothing off-the-cuff
* No corrections or clarifications or shifts in focus, it's not possible to edit slides on the fly
* One person 'on stage' with a clicker while everyone else listens quietly
* I don't know if this video is going to play or not
* afterward you might think yourself successful if someone "asks for the slides"
That's not to say bullets are great, the 6 level columbia slide is absolutely horrendous and bullets should not be the first tool one reaches for, contrary to what powerpoint easily invites for. Prefer a good graphical visualization of the raw data and annotate it with insights to back up your main argument, then let your slides back up your talk instead of being driven by them.
There is also the argument that slide decks tend to outlive their verbal presentations, because we are too lazy to create both a slidedeck and a properly written paper. Resulting in confusing low density bullet-lists being shared around. Here, a information dense presentation help, but it's usually not enough and often forces compromises to the main presentation.
Unless his boss has more changes.
Now it's so easy to create so much crap.
Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything.
Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that.
Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their intelligence.
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At times in life Powerpoint has really been my medium, it is much easier for me to put together presentations by putting together various graphics and symbols in PP than anything else, and I've tried.
My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is getting your thesis up top. The title of a page needs to be the only thing people really need to read to understand what you’re trying to convey. The contents of the page are just the details of why you’re saying it.
Most people instinctively do this in reverse and have a page where they throw a visual onto the page and make the title of the page just an announcement of what the visual is; and then either verbally or with small text callouts explain why it matters.
A one sentence thesis is good communication. That’s the point of a thesis statement. It’s the core idea behind most writing education. If you don’t have a clear thesis up front, then people have to divine what you’re trying to convey themselves bottom up from the arguments on the screen.
“Luring the listener into compliance” is frankly the reader’s problem. PowerPoints are presentations, not debate stimulus. They are generally intended for one person to convey information, not foster a group discussion. It would be very bad to blame the concept of a blog if you’re drawn in by persuasive writing to a false idea.
PowerPoints are bad when someone is using it and you can’t tell what they’re trying to tell you. Especially with regard to whether it has the verbal explanation or not.
A primary social hierarchy (Scientology, a corporation, Mao-era China) might feel threatened by various secondary and informal hierarchies (people who practice "the tech" on their own and make changes, workers who have the knowledge of how to do the company's task in their heads but not written down, sysadmins who keep a file of anyone who could possibly help them solve problems in their organization or with their vendors, fox cults, ...)
An accusation that is frequently leveled at McKinsey is that management brings them on to "launder" things they want to do, what I can say is that your slide decks are not just seen by the systems thinkers who are running the show but they are also seen by the people that the people who are running the show want to persuade.
In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages.
Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and concise.
* page one is a summary of pretty much every major point the deck will make
* if you only read the slide titles you’ll more or less recreate the summary on page one and get the story bit by bit
* if you want to understand that argument or question it you have the evidence for it on the same page
When done correctly it’s very much like reading good doc strings and collapsing or uncollapsing the function definitions to see the implementations
It’s the difference between good comments like
> sort the data by geospatial distance to the user
And classic bad ones like
> sort function
I didn't always present 100% of the "big and dense" slide decks; we could get people into a dialogue early on that would give us an idea of what to show next, a bit like a "choose your own adventure" book.
(Overall our approach was super effective at getting people to talk about their business, my partner got me to read https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Question-Based-Selling-Powerf...; We were always finding out about stuff we weren't supposed to know like the desktop virtualization program at a famously secretive hedge fund, the closely guarded data cleanup pipeline for a real estate data vendor, the time a four letter defense contractor was grasping at straws on a project for a three letter agency, ...)
Here's an example of a slide deck I would present to a general audience, in this case a local startup accelerator
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...
which is not as information dense as one of my sales slides but when I give talks like that they always want me back. (Funny that one felt obsolete by the end of 2017 but I packed in enough neural network stuff that it seems a little prescient now... Like that time I gave a talk at the first thorium energy conference about the computational physics program that would lead to a reactor that was mostly standard stuff out of intro level textbooks but useful and correct if you want to down that path. I took the schedule of reactor development when the project was abandoned in the 1970s and shifted it up to the present. The crowd reacted viscerally that it would take that long to which my answer is "you've got to get started now"; I wound up with a test reactor circa 2025 and sure enough they are building one in China.)
I can’t say I like the linked deck too much. Titles with no thesis. Visuals that don’t demonstrate anything on their own. It can work for speaking over. But it doesn’t actually convey information.
Somebody is going to go a talk like that and receive a bit more than they can absorb. They'll walk out with something that really sticks for them. It won't promote the feeling that "I took four days and spent $X to go to a conference and didn't get my money's worth."
It takes me forever. It's like preparing for a talk at a tech conference. I spend hours and hours off the clock refining the slides, the script, and rehearsing the timing.
Nobody's going to put in that effort if they have to present multiple times per quarter, especially if they know that nobody cares and that it doesn't really matter anyway.
Indeed, this can also be seen as a critique of structured code editors vs text editing. Mathematics books also follow tree structure a bit, (Def 6.3.1, Example 6.3.2), though there often is some connecting narrative.
The point about oversimplification to fit into a single slide is specific to PowerPoint. But, the critique that organization into discrete nodes often skips over an underlying narrative or a causal structure which connects the nodes is more general.
What can be said in defense of discrete organization? Firstly, the overall narrative is not initially apparent. Listing the pieces together can help to discover this structure.
Secondly, in long essays, the larger point often gets buried in the details. This is especially true in mathematical works where the purpose of a complicated definition/result is only seen a long time later. This also happens in source code, where a lot of preprocessing obscures the central purpose of a function (though of course, source code is not a candidate for a report with sentences anyway).
By forcing these documents to become less dense, the narrative actually becomes more apparent. Whereas with a dense document, the reader's attention can wander away before the punchline.
One issue that Tufte seems to not discuss in the oversimplification critique is that attention/time is limited. Since an organization leader cant read all reports 3 levels down the ladder (either usual style reports or nested trees), there needs to be a strategy for marking specific reports as important and also to mark which details from the document need to be passed on to higher levels of decision making and which details should be only relevant to middle managers.
In the Columbia report, the problem is not oversimplification but that the critical conclusion was mentioned as a low level detail whereas a methodology of choosing a 'conservative' model became the heading.
Could a usual technical report have avoided this issue? The 'conservative' phrase could well have been a section heading and the damage indicated in sentence buried inside the section. But a technical report also has a 'Conclusion' section which could have forced the authors to state their position clearly. This 'Conclusion' section is implicitly a protocol for which information in the report has to be passed up to a higher level. IPCC Reports have a 'Summary for Policymakers' in discrete points (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/). Tufte, for some reason, doesn't like "Executive Summary".
Both are here to write (info dense) but having a proper narrative structure with the 2 pager communicates far more than the PowerPoint does. A narrative structure can also drop down to bullet points it needed.
I've seen plenty of 50 page PP decks that ended up with slides full of paragraphs, basically being the worst of all possible communication formats.
What’s the meeting about? That’s the more important question.
Is this a decision making meeting? Is there one person making the decision or several?
Is this instead informational in nature? Are people supposed to understand the gist from this and do deeper research afterwards? Or should they come to the presentation already informed in some way?
PowerPoint is primarily a method for the speaker to organize their story, and secondarily for the audience to have visual landmarks to aid memory.
If you do anything else, you’re probably not planning your meetings properly.