I enjoyed this analysis of PowerPoint and agree with it wholeheartedly.
When I was studying business communication in college, a few of my professors demanded that if we chose to use words in our presentations, we were limited to three.
At first this was a difficult constraint, but I learned to love it, gradually implementing more visuals until my presentations were almost 100% photographs and data visualizations.
This improved the audience's response by leaps and bounds. They just can't comprehend all the information from a slide and a lengthy speech simultaneously.
Presenters should only use visuals to augment effective public speaking.
Any class I had in college, I self-imposed that constraint on myself. Well, more 'no words'. And yes, I think it helped tremendously.
That said, my more general rule of thumb is "Is this something I would have bothered to make a colored transparency, costs and all, if this was thirty years ago?"
If it -is-, by all means, make a slide.
If it isn't, don't make a slide of it.
If you're not certain, because it's something like an outline that you feel is necessary to follow your logic, or similar, make a handout of it, so that users can look at it -if they need to-, and it doesn't steal your focus.
Look at the work of John Sweller, a perceptual psychologist, for research on what happens when people are asked to absorb information visually and aurally at the same time. Supports your teachers' views.
Comments
I enjoyed this analysis of PowerPoint and agree with it wholeheartedly.
When I was studying business communication in college, a few of my professors demanded that if we chose to use words in our presentations, we were limited to three.
At first this was a difficult constraint, but I learned to love it, gradually implementing more visuals until my presentations were almost 100% photographs and data visualizations.
This improved the audience's response by leaps and bounds. They just can't comprehend all the information from a slide and a lengthy speech simultaneously.
Presenters should only use visuals to augment effective public speaking.
Any class I had in college, I self-imposed that constraint on myself. Well, more 'no words'. And yes, I think it helped tremendously.
That said, my more general rule of thumb is "Is this something I would have bothered to make a colored transparency, costs and all, if this was thirty years ago?"
If it -is-, by all means, make a slide.
If it isn't, don't make a slide of it.
If you're not certain, because it's something like an outline that you feel is necessary to follow your logic, or similar, make a handout of it, so that users can look at it -if they need to-, and it doesn't steal your focus.
Look at the work of John Sweller, a perceptual psychologist, for research on what happens when people are asked to absorb information visually and aurally at the same time. Supports your teachers' views.