In many of your college courses, you will be called upon to give oral presentations about related topics of research and study. What you have learned about written communication also may be applied to oral communication. The goal of this assignment is to improve your skills at preparing and delivering effective oral reports.
Requirements
Your presentation should be scheduled for ten to fifteen minutes in length. It should address some aspect of the project idea that you have selected. Your report should be accompanied by a visual presentation that is designed to enhance its effectiveness for your audience. You may use PowerPoint or other comparable software applications to assist in creating a sequence of slides that may be displayed using our video projection system. (The electronic file should be submitted to me prior to the presentation.)
Peer Review
Some time will be reserved for a class discussion of the effectiveness of your talk and visual presentation.
Before you begin this part of the assignment, consult the materials below.
Consult the following videos for an eloquent summaries of things to hate about PowerPoint and how to avoid them.
Don McMillan, “Life After Death by Powerpoint 2012” (How NOT to use Powerpoint), youtube.
David J. Phillips, ""How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint," TEDxStockholmSalon#2/2014, youtube.
The Thrill Has Gone.
In the 1980s two influential studies sponsored by Minnesota/3M concluded that an oral presentation with visual aids is more effective. In short, visual aids help to improve the audience’s perception of the speaker and likewise the speaker’s confidence. [1]
Today, audiences are bombarded with visual presentations that confuse, overwhelm, and simply bore them. Some of the blame can be fixed on the introduction of the software application PowerPoint in 1987. Yes, it is an impressive application. PowerPoint has empowered presenters from grade schoolers to corporate officers with the capability of designing and creating their own visual aids. But, power corrupts. Don McMillan offers classic examples of its abuse. Unfortunately, too much of a good thing is no longer good. Instead, speakers today can almost sense the inaudible groan from their audience when the lights are dimmed and the projector warms up.
Ironically, Robert Gaskins, the inventor of PowerPoint, published an essay stating that his application has been overused and abused. He advises its users to simplify their visuals and “return to formats nearly as spare as the old overhead transparencies” that PowerPoint replaced. Gaskins concludes with the plea that speakers should put more effort in the quality of the content of their talk and less in the decorations. [2]
The original intent of visual aids was to serve as an “aid”—that is, a supplement to the presentation. It is more common now that complex, dense and ponderous PowerPoint presentations become the focal point and the presenter is an audio aid for the slide show instead. As a result, the speaker fails to establish any connection with the audience because neither look at each other anymore.
Here are some basic points to keep in mind when you create your next PowerPoint slide show.
1. PowerPoint is a visual medium. It is most effective presenting visual information and less so presenting text. If you employ text, it should be simple and sparse. You want your readers to be listening to you and not busy reading.
2. Applications like PowerPoint provide tools that are best used by those who have training in graphic design. Unfortunately, most of us are not trained in graphic design. For the average user, too much time and emphasis on decorating your slides is probably wasted. Avoid the array of bells and whistles available using animated slide and text transitions. Most people simply find them annoying.
3. As David J. Phillips advises, the number of slides in a presentation are not the cause of death by PowerPoint. Instead, it is the number of objects and clutter that these slides contain. Each slide should present one single idea. It should never have more than 5 or 6 objects on it. Our working memory just can handle any more.
4. The slide show should follow the structure of your presentation and not vice-versa. An effective oral presentation shares similar structural elements with written presentations. Both have a beginning, middle, and end. Each has a distinct role or purpose and your slides should enhance that structure and not be a substitute for it.
5. Last, spend more time on preparing the oral presentation than on preparing the slide show.
Notes
[1] “A Study of the Effects of the Use of Overhead Transparencies on Business Meetings,” 3m/Wharton School, Wharton Applied Research Center, University of Pennsylvania (1981). Vogel, Dickson, and Lehman. “Persuasion and the Role of Visual Presentation Support: The UM/3M Study" (1986), reprinted by ThinkTwice, Inc.
[2] Gaskins, Robert. “PowerPoint at 20: Back to the Basics,” Communications of the ACM, Vol. 50, No.12 (December, 2007), 15–17.
Another Example. Professor R. L. Erion, South Dakota State University offers a detailed and vivid illustration of more PowerPoint pitfalls.
Page Maintained by J. T. Allen, Furman University