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Heed the Pleas for Better Presentations

Know the enemy

We hear it from industry, government, pockets of academia, and even the very creators of slide templates themselves: slides can cause major problems for presenters and audiences alike. It is too bad, really, because there is so much potential when slideware is used with purpose and toward targeted outcomes. If optimized outcomes are desired, then speakers need to maximize the effectiveness of presentation software tools.

Slide abuse appears in myriad forms; there are slides as teleprompters, slides as scripts, slides as data dumps, and slides as bullet boxes. The purpose for slides as audience aids is practically forgotten. Instead, the use of slides has become more of an unexamined ritual rather than a fully conceived information vehicle. See Figure 1.1 for a sample of a typical, less-than-optimal slide design. On the other hand, see how the same slide, reconfigured in Figure 1.2, shows a more engaging way to communicate the same material.

The depths of the problems with poor slide design are widely reported. Of late, it is difficult to browse a blog, attend a conference, or read a professional publication without seeing some discussion of how to improve presentation skills and slide design mastery. The creators of Microsoft’s PowerPoint program have commented on the rampant misuse of their creation by otherwise well-intentioned professionals [1]; top military commanders have called PowerPoint “the enemy” [2]; government agencies and boards bemoan PowerPoint engineering [3]; at least one information design guru has compared bad slides’ dominance of the presentation field to Stalin’s totalitarian regime [4]. At universities, students lament the laundry lists of bulleted ideas that their professors present in lecture, too often skipping steps and eschewing logical progressions of thought [5]. A decade-long mission called the “Annoying PowerPoint Survey” consistently documents the pain felt by audiences [6]. Blogs and other media continue the conversations daily as slide abuse persists.

FIGURE 1.1: Traditional slides fail.Slides that present nothing more than a series of bullets, such as this one, often fail because they do not engage the audience. Thisdesign approach does not incorporate what experts know about the ways that humans learn.

FIGURE 1.2: New practices work better. Deploy complete thoughts, high-value visuals, and archival notes. Doing so will move you toward creating technical talks that can be enhanced by slides rather than hobbled by them.

All too often, presenters and their audiences disparage the slide software itself as the problem. There is truth to that sentiment; no presentation tool is without its flaws. But poor presentations do not begin with imperfect presentation software. It is the unexamined patterns of communication that creates the problem. Slides have wonderful potential to reach people using all learning styles [7], but presenters too often kill that potential with a static, text-heavy approach.

Within the engineering, scientific, and technical fields, it is lamentable that many see communication as subordinate to engineering or scientific work, that communicating the details or results of the work is of lesser importance than the technical work itself. The engineers we work with spend 20–80% of their time at work engrossed in communication efforts, and those communication skills must be honed. Think of it this way: most of the work of building a bridge is the communication about the bridge. Much less time is actually spent building the structure. Communication about engineering and science is the bulk of the work in these fields. The sheer magnitude and importance of technical communication means that we must always strive for best practices.

While facts are immutable, the way we communicate them is never quite objective. Technical work, as much as anyone desires it to be “objective,” is subject to human perceptions. Once we acknowledge that communication is key and that it is always framed by subjective lenses, we understand that engineering and technical communication presentations need to be as clear, elegant, concise, and accurate as the work they give voice to. Applying best practices to presentations should be as much a part of the work output as anything else.

Be an agent of change

Our approach to shifting practices for engineering, scientific, or technical presentations is simple, and it looks like this:

Revisit presentation assumptions.

Write sentence headers.

Use targeted visuals.

Archive details for future use.

Keep looking forward.

Call a meeting instead of summoning a slide deck

Because presentations have become cornerstones for information dispersal in engineering, technical, and scientific realms (including business, research, government, and academia), presenters must find the best way possible to push that information to key players. When the audience becomes dissatisfied or bored with how information is conveyed, a barrier to success forms. We need to help listeners receive crucial technical information in more efficient, relevant, and applicable ways.

Current organizational cultures equate presentations and meetings with the creation of a set of slides. When a meeting is called, participants expect both a speaker and a slide deck. Probably all of us have heard, “I can’t make the meeting. Just send me your slides.” Whether the omnipresent use of slides as a work-related communication is good or bad, we will not argue here. In truth, slides have become an organizational norm. And if the speaker decides to conform to that expectation, the information dispersal must be as accurate, detailed, efficient, and helpful as possible.

At the same time, at the core of many technical fields is an ardent desire to make everything quicker, better, and cheaper. This demand applies to the gizmos, machines, processes, research, and materials that technical professionals produce; it also applies to the communication efforts used to push deliverables out the door. It is time to find a better way to turn information into action.

Destroy the decks of drudgery

Many of us in the technical fields have borne witness to thousands of slides that contain one word at the top and a parade of bullets below. These “decks of drudgery,” as one engineering colleague named them, are the bane of the working world (Figure 1.3). Of course, such slides seem perfectly reasonable and useful to the speaker, because the speaker either wants a teleprompter or does not understand the damage being done to the technical content [8].

However, this approach simply fails for the audience. The speaker may have thought that the slides’ information was perfectly organized; however, to the audience, the patterns were not so obvious. The speaker fills the screen with fragmented pieces of complex technical information, which are nothing more than fancy sticky notes projected on a large screen. This fails as an information vehicle, and it fails as a communication strategy. The audience deserves better.

A person would find it hard to unearth an organization or a company that is not looking to identify “best practices” to enhance workflow, streamline production, increase productivity, and/or develop good knowledge-exchange systems. To make technical presentations better, the best problem-solving techniques need to be applied to current presentation practices in order to find better ways to reach colleagues, coworkers, management, clients, and the public.

FIGURE 1.3: A deck of drudgery alienates the audience. The familiar bullet-laden slide deck is burdensome to the audience and a crutch for the speaker. Slide decks that look like this are nothing but a box of mind-numbing bullets. Better practices move a technical communicator toward presentation skills that engage and inform.

Learn communication lessons from past tragedies

It is not too often that poor technical information practices lead to death. But sometimes they do. At those moments, once the shock and grief for human loss subsides, organizations need to pause and examine internal practices from every angle. The Columbia Space Shuttle explosion had this impact in multiple disciplines, including presentation strategies; more than one person has linked poor slide design to the...