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A slide into mediocrity
4 September 2008
The PowerPoint presentation is redefining public speaking. Tara Brabazon argues that it is an unnecessary evil
The room was dark. An electric hum whirred. There was some whispering and impatient shuffling of shoes on carpet. A central screen bled blue light. A shadowy man hovered over a keyboard. The screen burst with colour. Life drained from the room.
Yes, it was going to be another of those presentations. You know the ones. Some bloke wrote a series of PowerPoint slides during the continental breakfast at the conference hotel and is now pretending that he has developed a polished and well-constructed argument. He fails.
He seems to forget that most of the audience can read his bullet points yet, for some reason, he repeats them aloud anyway. To offer some innovation in the predictability, he garbles around the headings, pretending that he is doing the conference equivalent of John Coltrane jazz improvisation with the English language. It could be a situationist experiment, but there is neither the content nor the context to make it clever or ironic. It could be performance art, but it looks as dull as it sounds.
I do not hate PowerPoint. It is only software and is not worthy of an emotional response. But I do despise PowerPointers. Public speaking at its best can inspire, enthuse, agitate and transform. It provides leadership, hope and a pathway to change. In an era of timeshifting and mobile communication, it is a special event for people to gather in the same room and experience the power of words at the same time. A great speaker and a great speech are rare and special.
The problem is that business meetings started to require that informal feedback – often termed “briefings” or “interim reports” – be shaped into some form of public presentation.
Middle managers were asked to convey content to their colleagues and because most of the population shake themselves senseless at the thought of speaking in public, tools were invented to mask the fear. Butcher’s paper, slides and overhead transparencies were used by those who could not gobble enough Valium to quell the trepidation.
Then PowerPoint arrived. Almost the entire text from a speech could be placed on slides. Nothing would have to be memorised. The frightened middle managers could simply parrot the bullet points they prepared earlier and hide behind a keyboard while they were reciting their lists. Perhaps appropriately, the software was invented in the year of fictional dystopia, 1984, by the company Forethought, which was purchased by Microsoft in 1987. There is something Orwellian about PowerPoint, caused by its ubiquity through business and education and its easy transformation of knowledge into mantras. But there have been costs for the speaker, speech and audience. The format encourages simplified inventories of complicated ideas.
This problem is made more serious because the software that was originally marketed as a business application spread through schools and universities in the late 1990s. Todd Parker, an English professor at DePaul University, said: “When they were first introduced, I thought I’d be happy to use such aids, but after trying several of them, especially PowerPoint, I’ve come to loathe them all with a passion – in particular because they easily become a crutch for the poor student and a stumbling block to students already too disengaged from the act of learning.”
There is a sizeable minority of people who dislike PowerPoint and/or PowerPointers. Julia Keller asked in a Chicago Tribune column: “Is PowerPoint the Devil?” Thomas Stewart in Fortune wrote an article with the impressive title “Ban it now! Friends don’t let friends use PowerPoint.” Even from the pages of Wired, Edward Tufte confirmed that “PowerPoint is evil.”
PowerPoint is a crutch for poor speakers. Once they start using the programme, they rarely stop using it. If they do not have access to the software – as we have seen at conferences when the laptop/memory stick fails or the computer system is password protected and all the technicians have gone for a cigarette break – there can be no presentation. The software must speak on a delegate’s behalf. Although the shaking conference attendee has a mouth and brain, without their slides they are left devoid of a voice or ideas.
PowerPoint has not only corroded public speaking but made conferences bland and boring. Most speeches are structured through the same repetitive template. Few bother writing a considered talk, assuming that constructing slides is all that is required. They align a few bullet-pointed phrases, import a couple of animated gifs and add a quirky cartoon, assuming that their efforts have magically morphed into a speech.
I wonder what would have happened if Martin Luther King had used PowerPoint for “I have a dream.” Would there be a tasteful slide of the “red hills of Georgia” and the “mountains of New York”? Some fine mahogany furniture could represent “the table of brotherhood”. Would an attractive image of his “four little children” be included along with a picture of a large boulder of granite to represent the “stone of hope”? We do not have to imagine this clash of a great speech with mediocre software. A YouTuber has taken the audio from the Martin Luther King speech and PowerPointed it. It is called – and coolguy2754168 really stretched himself with this title – "I have a dream speech slideshow".
The complexity, passion and energy of King’s words are dragged down to the banal and literal. But it does demonstrate how PowerPoint can undermine and minimise even the greatest of speeches.
The purpose of public speaking is to communicate. The goal is to facilitate dialogue about important ideas. In so many cases, the proto-PowerPointed room is reduced not just to an artificial dusk, but blackened completely except for a slash of light from the screen. While our middle managers used to hide behind butcher’s paper to mask their nerves, now audiences cannot see the speaker at all.
What about PowerPoint in educational environments? We wonder why students have stopped coming to lectures. It is not only because slides are uploaded and distributed from the course portal. Students would still attend if academics delivered more than PowerPointed content and ideas. Unfortunately, the slides are the lecture. Why would they come if every word and idea is available to download at their convenience?
Teaching materials used to be constructed after the text of the session had been written. Music, visuals and physical objects were chosen and deployed in response to learning needs. Now too many teachers let the tools dictate the form and flow of their lectures, tutorials and seminars. The fault is not PowerPoint. The problem is how PowerPointers use it. The tool has become more important than the reason why it is used. What could be an innovative, occasional hub of sound and vision is used as a crutch by lazy, frightened or inexperienced teachers and ill-prepared speakers.
The best use of PowerPoint emerges when it displays evidence or further information and does not replicate the oral content of the speech. It is – at its best - an effective slide manager. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth slideshow is a masterful mixture of talk and visuals. He rarely reads the words on the screen. Instead, he uses the slides as a starting – or reference – point for his engagement with an audience.
Gore was successful because he did not confuse the objectives of public communication with the support tools for speaking. It is the predictability of PowerPoint presentations that is the most disturbing part of their application. It is Fordist software for assembly line sessions.
Barack Obama, one of the finest public speakers we have seen in political life in the last decade, focuses on the words, the tone and the ideas. A concise message is presented in a polished fashion. Perhaps – at least for four years – we may not have to suffer a PowerPoint President.
Through Obama’s example, it is time to bring back diversity and excitement to public speaking. Surely, someone is tiring of the cycle: plug in a laptop, darken a room, show the first slide, second, third, fortieth and then the final slide with “Thank you” and an email address. Lights on, next speaker steps onto the podium, plugs in a laptop and darkens the room…
We need to stop this behaviour. With some courage, we can find both power and the point. And we can leave on the lights.
Readers' comments
Loved your story. Used to think I was the only one who hated PowerPoint.
Wow. Someone seems a little threatened. I grant that there are some lame users of PowerPoint out there, but this rant has dinosaur written all over it. You speak of the good old days when the "text" of the lecture was written first, and tools came later. But in academic environments, at least, I thought we were beginning to learn that teaching contact is not about the lecturer conveying some set content, even if it is a cleverly drafted speech. If your presentation represents a "text", then your students might as well read it, unless you happen to be Martin Luther King or Barack Obama. <p>The high quality universities that I have contact with are replete with confident and skilled users of PowerPoint. Most of us are not a bit flustered if the hardware doesn't work, and we simply glance at our printed-out slides in the same way as non-PowerPointers glance at notes. I would say that it is far more common in research-led institutions to see lecturers using PowerPoint in the way you say we should: flashing up some facts to set the stage for a vignette; using it to list statistics that would clutter up oral communication. We realise that the primary value of lectures and seminars is to engage with the students, and PowerPoint can be and is frequently an effectively used support for that activity. <p>I get the impression you attend more business presentations than undergraduate lectures. It is unfortunate that your bad experiences lead you to bad-mouth something most of us use not as a crutch, but as a tool that frees us to interact in a flexible way with our student groups. Because I do not need to commit a script to memory, I move around confidently in close proximity to the students, taking questions, and letting my lecture feel more like a one-on-one explanation of concepts or case studies whose components or facts are up on the screen for us to refer back to. I never give them the slides as a handout; I never read them except as an aid for the vision impaired; and I never put the main point of the slide on the slide. The main point comes through my elaboration and explanation, or through Socratic development of the students' thoughts. Finally, I do not need to control the pacing of my lecture through careful crafting of my "speech." Instead, I know how many topics--represented by slides--I intend to cover. I feel free to encourage a discussion or deliver a semi-extemporaneous clarification (I am never making it all up entirely at the time) for each topic, and I know about how much time I can spend before I must move on to the next topic. <p>I am not alone in this approach. A lot of academics embrace PowerPoint not because they lack confidence or imagination (although in a way, what is wrong with a new lecturer using a tool that helps them overcome their diffidence, so long as they learn to use it right?) but because it makes it easier for them to construct a year's worth of contact and interaction sessions with student groups. Most of us have accepted by now that we are not going to make all of our 20-40 lectures a year into "I Have a Dream" speeches, and nor do the students need that. Instead, they need us to use a variety of tools and techniques to make the hour or two a week they spend with us useful and interesting to them. They are the protagonists in these sessions, so teacher oratory is not a high priority. PowerPoint is a tool to help the students, and year after year I and other colleagues receive positive student feedback on it. I agree that bad PowerPoint use is soul-destroying, but so is bad memorised speechifying. Please don't blame PowerPoint for the mediocrity that will shine through whatever the technique.
Aaron, do you have a PowerPoint presentation for that comment?
Yep powerpoint is great for lectures. I have 250 students in my lectures now they can see nice graphs, the latest data and charts rather than handwriting that they can't read, the graphs are clearly labelled for them and have nice worked out numbers to illustrate important concepts and can cover much more material to a higher level. Also the weaker ones have something they can look at to help them in their readings. <p>So yes at Universities powerpoint is used more effectively than in boring low level business presentations. The days of "chalk and talk" are unacceptable these days with such large lecture sizes.
The bright glare of the screen keeps the students awake.
And why Barak Obama only?... ;) <br>Palin seems to be non-familiar with computer at all! <br>Maybe is she better, eh? :) <p>Hmmm... It will be observed, some articles of THES look a bit oddly.... 8-O
I entirely agree with this. I think that Aaron misses the point in his comment. He contrasts the use of PowerPoint to the use of memorised, set speeches, and finds in favour of the former. But that is a false choice. It's not like the speaker has the option of *either* using slides and extemporising *or* using no slides and sticking to a script. In fact I don't really see the connection between the script/extemporising choice and the slides/no slides choice. They are different issues. All of the positive, Socratic-type features that Aaron describes can be done without PowerPoint and in fact are quite distinct from it. Socrates didn't use PowerPoint, did he? <p>I agree that the inflexible delivery of a pre-written speech is largely pointless; why not just read it? But surely much of the point of this article is that many people use PowerPoint precisely in that way: the slides are the speech, and the speech consists of simply displaying the slides and reading what's on them, with perhaps a bit of elaboration. That's no more flexible or accommodating to the audience than reading a speech from paper is. <p>I can see the value of PowerPoint for presentations that really are visual in nature, such as those where a lot of data and graphs and things are involved. But in the humanities at least there is rarely a need for this. I think that slides are more distracting than anything else. If I'm looking at the slide, I'm not listening to the speaker.
A poor workman blames his tools! <p>PowerPoint can be excellent. I use it in my lectures and can include colour pictures, video, links to the internet, and provide an exciting experience for my students. I teach aerospace engineering, and can see the amazement on my students faces when I play them a YouTube video of a plane accident reconstruction or movie of an A380 flight test. I can use it to show equations where students can actually read every subscript from tha back of a 250-seat lecture room, and colour the different terms, or even animate them, to help push home a particular point. That was a big leap forward with OHPs too, but legibility on those is variable at best! <p>Many of my colleagues chalk-and-talk. We all get good feedback from students. <p>It's all about the delivery. Everybody is different, students and academics alike. PowerPoint may be a crutch, but is that better than just laying on the floor and getting nowhere? <p>Cheers, <br>Kenji
Clearly Tara Brabazon does not live in the real world. Her photo suggests that her cultural capital is that of a middle class business woman who has never got her hands dirty, literally, or metaphorically, in the seminar room. She doesn't understand what a boon to lecturing a colourful PPT presentation full of images and bullet points can be at 10.00am on a cold and wintry morn' to some bored undergrads when the lecturer is also tired and in need of an audio-visual aid or two. <p>She also doesn't understand the exploitative nature of the HE workplace. She has clearly never had to deliver 62 lectures over 6 modules in 2 semesters in a new University facing massive HEFCE cutbacks to its annual budget. The fact that I can still produce an entertaining and hopefully illuminating lecture with my creative 'crutch' of a Powerpoint has nothing to do with some romantic age that Ms Brabazon believes still exists somewhere but the material reality of working in a 'new' University not the privileged space of some Oxbridge college or wealthy business school.
But Tara Brabazon teaches at the University of Brighton, doesn't she? Until 1992, that was Brighton Polytechnic, so it's the very definition of a new university, surely?
Yes there are very good users of PowerPoint and it can be a boon if it aids the experience. Sadly however the article is an accurate representation of every management, admin, central training, IT presentation I have witnesses in a decade plus of working at a new university. <p>PowerPoint is not the problem it is how it is usually used that is. I can quite easily read the slide projected, I can usually also read it on the nice "hand-out" which is also usually provided or, If I am in the presence of a really innovative speaker, on the podcast also supplied. On a goodl day I often still have time to count the roof tiles/seats/ electrical sockets, audience with spectacles etc. before the presenter has read the slide. <p>Worse still it is also true of 90%+ of every lecture and scientific conference presentation I have seen it used in. Of course it may also just be “hard” scientists are unimaginative. <p>Still no worries, it must be appreciated by our customers as my department are top of the national student satisfaction survey within out discipline.
I cant imagine anything more dreadful than having to use the dreaded Powerpoint to lecture to groups of students. That is not my lecturing or teaching style, whatsoever. I would much rather get the students working on realistic examples of what it is I am trying to teach them, if at all possible. But then I am one of those people who really wants their students to learn something, rather than to pontificate to them.
I tend to do a group profile before i teach to guage what type of learners i have in a group. <p>Some people are visual some aural and some kinetic learners. If i have a good mix i may well use a powerpoint to help the visual and aural learners. <p>What is important however, is that we dont teach the way we like to teach i.e. Doing something one way because that's what we find comfortable/easy. If we do that we are in danger of missing the needs of the group we deliver to.
The problem with powerpoint for me is that it makes sense for the audience to have a paper copy of the slides. However, the presentation is then entirely predictable, and as has already been said, you can often then 'see' the point in seconds while the speaker makes a meal of it. <p>The chalk and talk lecture had much to recommend it - and I mean chalk (not whiteboard pens!).