Tom Johnson has a funny and insightful little post about how to screw up your next PowerPoint presentation. I found the timing creepy because I've spent at least 16 hours over the past five days screwing around with a presentation we're preparing for a large regional developer that is promising thousands of jobs, millions of tourism dollars annually, and an overall greener CNY in which to work, live and play.
The information in the presentation is well-organized and the tone/style are consistent. Overall, I think it's a relatively consistent and effective little presentation (12 slides total, not counting transition/effects slides). What's missing is the "space" between myself (as the principle author) and the content.
Tom's post refers to the space as the distance between the author and the content. My personal biases toward said developer aside, I think I need to move closer the content -- make it more of a story than an information product. I'm always telling my students to think of their technical documents as narratives in an ongoing story; of weaving a consistent theme (be it a particular design criteria or over-arching functionality) through their documents. Make the technical document something personal, give it a voice and style. Make it such that the reader immediately identifies with the content.
It's hard enough to do this with something like a functional specification or test script. And I don't know if I've ever listened to a presentation in which I could locate myself. I'm sure I've seen a few presenters get lost in their work, but I think that's something different entirely. We'll see where I can take this thing over the next few days. The show is on Friday. Details then.
2 comments:
Thanks for the mention. I enjoyed your post. Would you mind expanding on how to make a powerpoint presentation into a story? I know it sounds good and seems like an appealing direction, but how do you approach that? Do you focus on obstacles/challenges and how people overcome them, which is what narratives often do? Can you give me any more detail?
(Also, if you do reply with more detail, can you email me at tomjohnson1492@gmail.com letting me know? Thanks.)
Tom, I'm not sure I was able to pull this off. We did have our presenation, but I found myself in the same old situation - trying to orient the discussion (not the presenation) to the audience's shifting focus.
Maybe that's what effective PPTs are all about. Short of making an animated and narrated "movie" of events, the PPT merely serves to provide context. The personalization - the closeness to the content - is found in the presenters words, not the PPT text/graphics. Perhaps it's asking too much of PowerPoint or any presentational tool to allow for a "closeness" to the content. An author's relationship with a text builds over time, throughout the ebb and flow of the document. PPTs aren't designed to accomodate that ebb and flow.
This is where I'm at now. I'm still facinated by the concept of closeness to presentational material. I think I need to recover some readings about visual rhetoric to make more sense of it.
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