Why bad power point can be really good for you and us
Powerpoint presentations in academia and policy settings — a bit like the weather: they mainly get commented on when they are pretty bad or pretty good. And the former happens much more often than the latter.
From blogs to books to snarky tweets, powerpoint critiques seems to have become a bit of a genre in themselves. Surprisingly, or rather depressingly, even after more than 35 years of powerpointing, this type of criticism that has been around since the beginnings still seems to be needed and is flourishing.
Here a few thoughts, not to join in and lament the seemingly stubborn persistence of bad presentations, but to challenge the main gist of the criticism, entirely selective and anecdote-driven, and thus probably a bit unfair, but here we go.
What almost all complaints about bad ppts and the recommendations on how to do good ppts have in common is that they seem to have a rather clear and rather uniform idea of how things should be done: not too many words, no power point karaoke, not too many slides, use more pictures… They prescribe all this in a very confident manner, with very little disagreement, in a way establishing the style canon of good power-pointing — a kind of Scandinavian mid-century aesthetic — for policy and research. I sense two problems:
First, there is almost no regard for how different presenter types might feel much more comfortable with and flourish with different presentation styles and formats. An introvert, unexperienced speaker or one on the other side of the spectrum who tends to diverge into loquacious off-topic storytelling might both benefit from preparing slides with a few more words on them, different aspects more spelled out etc. I much prefer following a presentation with a well-crafted flow of points and sub-points in front-of-me than looking at a couple of cryptic pictures or very often very bland stockphoto images, while someone insecurely stumbles through a complex argument or embarks on a meandering grand storytelling expedition. If you are Larry Lessig, you can pull it off. If you are not, better put togethr a more developed script in slides for the audience.
Ionically it is often the people that preach the relevance of context, the tailoring of communication to audience and purpose that then go on to suggest a very uniform way of doing powerpoints as if type of speaker and function of presentation did not matter.
Second and perhaps in the aggregate more consequential: sameness breeds boredom, aesthetic uniformity kills creativity and delivers blandness, from buildings to TV shows, from podcasts to — powerpoints. I am subscribed to more than 150 policy and science podcasts and really love them. Yet the more professional podcasts get the more all non-fictional, longer-form formats seem to fall in line with a particular narrative style à la the NYT’s The Daily that forces every story into the same type of dramatic arc, very similar soundscapes and even a similar voice pitch for the presenters. It could be a story from a war zone, an analysis of the cannabis market or the personal journey of a pizza baker — they are all told in a similar way. And similarly all .pptx presentation styles seem to try to emulate an aesthetically sanitized Ted Talk type of style. Ted Talks might have been great at the beginning, but can you really watch more than five in a row without getting bored and feeling narratively-bloated, noticing all these cheap psychological and communication tricks that might work for a while and then wear off. Well powerpoint advice seems to try hard to make us go down the same alley.
Messing it all up
So start with what you are trying to do to whom but also who you are. Keep in mind what your audience will actually use your presentation for and then consider disregarding the style mafia and mess around as you see fit. Here some half-cooked ideas. They may or may not work but perhaps they inspire:
- Ever tried font-size 98 and having words run out of bounds? (advice: let the conference organizers know if you do this — I had on several occasions some nice, proactive admin person re-format my prez during upload to save me from disgrace…)
- Stop power-pointing in the middle of your talk and include a slide that jut says “listen now”
- Or do the opposite, invite your audience to spend two minutes reading and reflecting on a single slide before you resume your talk and start engaging with the ideas on it
- Include some “for-your-files” slides that come with dense text and summarize a key argument and that you invite your audience to snap a picture of or for online audience to CTRL-WINDOW-S screenshot and paste into their notes? You can do this super-quickly, even in recording-protected zoom presentations
These are just some things that come to mind, most importantly, think about what you want to convey and how to make a very good argument — then think about the best way for you and your audience to engage around this. Mid-century Scandinavian design and Ted-Talk storytelling are beautiful, but a world that is exclusively populated by them would feel just bland and plasticky. Don’t let power-pointing succumb to a similar hegemony of sameness.
