If you want to test a man's character give him power*point | Hacker News Reader

If you want to test a man's character give him power*point

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6 pointsmbriyo9 comments

7 rules for effective presentations from slide:ology

Terrible. The assumption that powerpoint or any other slideware is an effective way of transmitting information is flawed. See Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" for a good analysis of the problems this brings (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint ).

I've not read the essay (and, with no obvious way to purchase any version other than dead-tree, I likely will not), but the blurb concludes:

"What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?"

This seems to imply that the opposite assumption you seem to be making -- slides can never effectively transmit information -- is also flawed.

On the contrary. A part of the essay is available online, from the linked page. Tufte is very clear that it is possible to have informative presentations - but slideware does not help towards this goal. He argues that slides have a terrible bandwidth, and do not help anyone but the worst 5% of presenters, where they help by imposing structure - any structure at all - on the presentation. All other presenters, he states, would be better off without slides, and should rather just talk, or, better, give their audience their ideas in written form, as sentences made of words rather than slides made of points, and talk about them once they have been read and understood.

The essay you linked is titled "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within". The link from that page is to an excerpt of an essay titled "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports". Given that they have different titles, I suspect they are not the same essay, and the latter essay concludes not with PowerPoint being unable to transmit information, but with a (sensible) recommendation to use technical reports when technical reports are called for.

The excerpt is in fact from the essay (I'd know, it's right here in the dead tree version)

I think you're missing Tufte's point. He's not saying PowerPoint is useless- he's saying the way it gets used 95% of the time is useless. Too often they end up putting their outlines directly into their slides, bullet point by bullet point, and insert graphics as a distracting afterthought. PowerPoint makes it really easy to do this, people are lazy, and this is what the audience has come to expect.

That doesn't mean slideware HAS to be used that way. Steve Jobs tends to do quite well with it. Tufte himself uses PowerPoint for his conferences. I imagine he'd agree with most of what was said in the article. Keep it clean and visual, as a way of cueing the audience with mental images and (extremely sparingly) emphasizing the keyest of key points with text. It should be a springboard for the presentation and not the presentation itself.

Don't throw the baby out with the bath water- these programs were created and has become so popular because they do something people want, and they're the best tools people have, even if they are wielded clumsily.

Interesting comment. But then again saying "terrible" is easy. On the other hand, how do YOU present ideas, concepts and information to your clients and audience? I am open to suggestions.

Indeed. Negatives are much easier to throw around than positives, and much less useful. I'll try to answer your question as well as I can. (given it's 7 am and I am barely awake)

When presenting a method or a program to students, I try to start from as scratch as reasonable. I recently prepared an experiment for a student of ours, and essentially wrote the program in front of him, running it at intermediate stages so he could see it evolve. He felt comfortable changing the functionality afterwards, so I expect the information transfer worked. I've done the same before with small student groups, creating something minimal, but perfectly understood.

For negotiation situations, I prefer doing them in person or at the very least over the phone, but preferably so that I have all the data in front of me. At that point, I want the other person's attention focused on me, not on the projection screen.

When showing a thing, like a program or a concept, I like to show the thing rather than showing something that shows the thing. I'd explain it and demonstrate it rather than showing slides about it. I might show photos of it being used in situations I can't directly reproduce.

In all of these situations, slideware would not have noticeably improved things. And it's always a timesink, for me at least.

Good points. To quote Benjamin Franklin "Tell me and I Forget, Teach me and I Learn, Involve Me and I Remember. But then again my set of problems is slightly different than yours. I work in advertising and often times we sell rough ideas, stories and concepts. Clients in this case also ask for data to validate these ideas. So, I do believe that there is a role (and an expectation) for powerpoint in corporate America. But I also feel that we can do a better job communicating in these situations, thus the post...

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