Public Speaking With Your Computer: Get Your Message Across with PowerPoint Training

Have you ever thought that using PowerPoint to create a computerized slideshow might be confusing your audience, rather than explaining your point? Proper training in writing and putting slides together will help you do a better job, and ensure you get your message across clearly.

Is PowerPoint Making Us Dumb?

These days, lots of us have jobs that require public presentations, and PowerPoint is often our program of choice when it comes to creating a slideshow.

But have you ever considered that PowerPoint might be obscuring your message instead of making it clearer? That by continually breaking down your information into bite-sized chunks, PowerPoint is limiting your audience's ability to take in more complicated information? That PowerPoint is, in fact, making us dumb?

Edward Tufte, professor emeritus of political science at Yale, thinks it is. In a piece entitled "PowerPoint Is Evil," he says the problem with computerized slideshows is that they lack intelligent content, but are over-burdened with special effects.

"The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates form over content," he says. "If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure."

Training Ourselves to Present a Clearer Picture

Calling PowerPoint "evil" might be going a bit far, but it wouldn't hurt any of us to invest a bit of time learning how to communicate our information in a clearer way. For example:

presenting complex information clearly but without reducing it to bullet points
writing a script, which means we aren't reading from the computer screen
creating slides that are not so cluttered that their message is hidden
limiting ourselves to one idea per slide

Training will help you do a better job, but make sure you select a program, book or CD that focuses on getting the information across, not on creating pretty slides that don't support your message, or worse, that obscure it.

Sources
Wired.com
Sociablemedia.com
Maya.com