Presentation Style - The Death of Bullet Points

When was the last time you visited a presentation and came away impressed by the slides?
It is, of course, fashionable nowadays to talk negatively regarding PowerPoint, and the way most on-screen presentations place audiences to "death" with an onslaught of 1 bullet-pointed paragraph of words when another. It is also true that the same people who wish to trash PowerPoint usually produce mind-numbing program themselves, and then claim that it isn't their fault - their bosses make them beget slides that turn brains to butter.
Though businesspeople are pretty much stuck with PowerPoint these days, and probably will be for the foreseeable future, there have been some pioneers out there who are making an attempt to change the ways we use slides to convey information or persuade others to work out things our way. And so even though PowerPoint continues to be terribly abundant alive and kicking, we have a tendency to think that bullet points as knowledge builders might be doomed: some designers at the innovative are attempting new forms and structures.
One person whose work you must grasp if you do not already is Cliff Atkinson. In step with Michael McLaughlin, coauthor with Jay Conrad Levinson of Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants, "Cliff Atkinson believes he is engineered a better mouse trap. He needs us to dump boring, bullet-riddled slides, and he contains a artistic resolution: he faucets Hollywood-vogue storytelling to rework PowerPoint displays from endless lists of bullet points into compelling communications."
Atkinson's book Beyond Bullet Points shows you how to use the ability of storytelling to form PowerPoint shows effective communication tools, not just speaker notes. With Atkinson's method, you not solely turn out presentations that aren't boring, however you are conjointly forced to think about what you are saying in an exceedingly approach that each one audiences relate to: telling them a story.
You ought to conjointly be aware of Lawrence Lessig, who has created a buzz over the last couple years with what he believes is a "minimalist" presentation design approach. It's fascinating, and definitely value getting up to hurry on it if you're in the presentation business. The best example of this style that we have seen is in a keynote given by a man named Dick Hardt. You actually would like to observe this performance to understand its power as an antidote to the common business presentation. Here is simply one link: identity20.com/media/OSCON2005.
The matter I've got with this approach is that while its followers take into account it minimalist as a result of there is sometimes no more that one word or image on the screen at a time, virtually EVERY word in the narrative is projected, thus that with a little follow, the presenter merely delivers a fully pre-written script. It is interesting to look at and definitely holds your attention throughout, however instead of putting the presenter at the center of the method, the result's that ninety nine% of the audience's attention is drawn to the screen.
The extremely scary thing here is that it most likely can have huge appeal to NewGens and younger, who unfortunately don't have any plan how to relate to another human except through the interface of some electronic device. Therefore this is presentation as video-game / hip hop / text-message-me-from-the-finish-of-the-bar. The presentation IS the screen, and also the presenter gets kudos for his electronic style skills instead of her ability to be human.
In fact, your Master of the PowerPoint Universe here has not been asleep at the switch for the past couple years, this year you'll see the World Premiere of what we tend to are offering up as a full new language of presentation design, with its own very tight grammar, all based on using minimalism to focus the audience on the presenter.
We haven't however determined how to whole it ("Beyond Bullet Points" is already taken, and "Pointless" does not sound terribly price-added). Internally we have a tendency to've been relating it as The Language of the Bar because we tend to use vertical lines (bars) instead of bullet points to both go away paragraph levels and additionally presage to each the presenter and therefore the audience how much additional (if any) can follow on the screen after the last reveal.
It occurred to us a while ago that whereas bullet points do work to set off one huge cluster of words from another huge cluster (the three-line 'paragraphs' we sometimes see), they don't make a lot of sense when you are doing what you must do and never have a lot of than some words on each line. The road itself activates the one purpose from the next. Thus if you are using PowerPoint properly, that's, to simply key the audience where you are going and key you to what you're going to mention, bullets become superfluous. Bonus: your slides look a heap cleaner while not them.
Back to this new presentation language: although both Atkinson and Lessig dispense with bullet points, we tend to believe that rather than simply throwing out structure altogether, there are will increase in both comprehension and retention when the presentation conforms to a group of predictable rules - a grammar, if you will. We believe that when your grammar presages what is to come (in a haiku, as an example, you know specifically how several words are coming next), you create both heightened expectation and the comfort of knowing how abundant brain RAM you have got to reserve.
Long-term readers know we're committed to showing the globe that PowerPoint (and conjointly Apple's Keynote, that we've been using lately) is NOT the problem. We tend to do not grasp if this is the answer, however we have a tendency to know you may really, extremely like what you will see.

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Leslie Donner has been writing articles online for nearly 2 years now. Not only does this author specialize in Presentation Style - The Death of Bullet Points You can also check out her latest website about FurnitureMoving Pads Which reviews and lists the best Insulated Dog Houses

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