Powerpoint harms more presentations than it helps. It is bigger than you and brighter (lit) than you. Our eye is drawn to light: so people will be looking at it when they should be watching your passion.

Use it if there is really no alternative, but think hard first.

I say as much here; perhaps you will like it – http://bit.ly/mQzmp

All the best,

Adam

You wrote that listening to the radio requires more focused concentration because “the visual part of your brain is given nothing to do.” I strongly disagree. When you listen to the radio your eyes are given nothing to do, but there is an overwhelming body of evidence – both scientific and experiential – that the visual part of your brain is active.

For example the work of Harvard professor of psychology, Stephen Kosslyn – http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kosslyn/kosslyn_print.html – whose research indicates that “about two-thirds of the same brain areas are involved in visual mental imagery and visual perception.” Kosslyn’s research has very interesting implications for the kind of word-based visualisation techniques practised in cognitive therapy, and hypnosis.

There is also plenty of evidence that an individual’s response to a word is often synaesthetic – or multisensory – in nature. Have a look at – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8070210.stm – which reports that according to Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, we are all “synaesthetes” up to a point.”

I will be writing about these very interesting topics in future posts – and exploring their implications for how we respond to great oratory and literature – i.e. words.

I do agree with a lot of what you say. You have me thinking about the difference between radio and TV.

I think it requires more focused concentration to listen to the radio without doing anything else. That’s because the visual part of your brain is given nothing to do – so it’s likely to have its attention attracted to different things. So it works for me to listen to the radio while I’m doing a manual activity. There’s research that people who doodle while listening to something are able to remember more (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7912671.stm). You could think of providing visuals through PowerPoint as giving the visual part of the brain something to look at so that it doesn’t get bored and “wander off”.

I agree that the flipchart is a great tool with a smaller audience – more intimate, more dynamic and engaging. I use it a lot (even though I can’t draw like you!) But I don’t think of PowerPoint as a last resort. I think it’s useful to provide visuals for your audience – and often visually-interesting PowerPoint slides will be the best way.

Olivia

I agree with you that the pictures on radio are not always better, but there are various reasons for this: one of the most obvious being that not all speakers have the same command of language – which is why many of them choose to work with professionals like us!

TV may be the more a popular medium but I think this is because it demands less of its audience than radio. We watch a lot more TV but less of it goes in and I believe this is because watching TV is a much more passive occupation than listening to the radio.

The power of Vince Cable’s attack comes from the fact that each of us creates our own image of Stalin and Mr Bean – and these may not even be especially ‘visual’ images. It’s a bit like the difference between reading a novel and seeing an adaptation of it on TV, or in the cinema. Too often we’re disappointed because the actors don’t look or behave at all like the characters we’ve constructed in our imaginations while reading the book.

One of the most important lessons classical rhetoric teaches us is the importance of making your audience an active participant in your speech, or presentation. One of the main techniques they used to encourage audience participation was to offer their audiences arguments which had elements missing so that they’d have to fill in the missing parts themselves – this type of argument is known as an enthymeme and I’ll be writing about it in future posts.

I agree with you that there are situations when a diagram can be a very useful visual aid for an audience – but PowerPoint slides are not the only way to display these. We encourage people to use more immediate – and intimate/personal – tools (such as the humble flipchart) wherever possible. Clearly there will times when PowerPoint is the best solution, but in my opinion it should be a last resort.

I agree that you don’t always have to use PowerPoint.

And I also agree that you can exploit the power of the visual through painting word pictures in your audience’s minds. And sometimes that’s more powerful than actually showing a picture – as in your example of going Stalin to Mr Bean.

However, I don’t think that “the pictures are better on the radio” is always true. TV is more popular than the radio because it does have pictures.

The Stalin to Mr Bean metaphor works because most of have already got images of Stalin and Mr Bean stored in our brains. So when the speaker uses that metaphor we can conjure up the images without the speaker showing them to us on PowerPoint.

In many presenting situations, the audience won’t have those images, the diagram or the chart ready-to-go in their brains – and that’s when PowerPoint and Keynote become really useful.

Olivia