Working On Me

Exhibit B is another prime candidate for PowerPoint Room 101.

There are some good things about this slide. Notice how the title is at the left rather than the top. This sort of variation from slide to slide will help to maintain interest. Also, there is the recognition that linking concepts to pictures will aid retention.

Problems?

1. Look at the big image to the left. It’s a picture of somebody talking, so theoretically it matches the concept it is used to represent. However, the man actually looks quite angry, almost as though he is snarling the words. In view of the three things we’re highlighting, this is highly inappropriate. It’s the picture which will linger in memories, not the words.
2. Notice how contrived some of the links are. Powerful = weightlifter? This is a sign of the designer having three things: (a) a mistaken belief that here needs to be a picture for everything; (b) a small clipart collection; and (c) a limited imagination.
3. The graphical styles here are completely at odds with each other. Stick men, cartoon heads and photo-realism shouldn’t be together in the same presentation, let alone on one slide.
4. The typography of the main heading to the left needs work. Having the word ‘new’ all alone on the line strikes a discordant note and inappropriately emphasises newness. Stretching the text box slightly would put matters right.
5. On the right hand side of the slide, we have what is fundamentally a bullet list, albeit one decorated with pictures. Moving the second picture to the left and putting the word ‘successful’ to its right would break up the tyranny of the vertical list.
6. If a picture really does paint a thousand words, given that we have put an appropriate picture on the slide, why bother with one word? Could the picture stand alone, particularly since the speaker will be filling out the detail when he speaks?

And while we’re on the subject of clichés (“a thousand words”? For goodness’ sake!) have you seen any of those clipart pictures before? There are clipart clichés as well as verbal clichés. Many of of us can remember the days of Word 6 with its tiny clip art collection. For a few years back in the early 90s, that bald man scratching his head and the angry man thumping the table must have been on the screen more often than Carol Vordeman. The next time you use the little stick men in a huddle to represent teamwork, or the flashing lightbulb to symbolise an idea, at least consider whether there is any other way you could depict these concepts.

As promised, I'm going to critique a couple of nasty powerPoint slides. Let’s start with a truly hideous example of what is possible in PowerPoint. Have a look at Exhibit A.

So, where do we start with this one? This slide has a number of errors:

1. I think the first point is that the sidebar and the slide title are vying for attention quite loudly. It’s a battle that either of them could win, but your text stands little chance of scoring a hit in such heavy crossfire!
2. And speaking of that sidebar, it has stolen a good 20% of your screen space. Up on the wall, that’s a huge acreage which you can’t use for anything else.
3. Your logo is also cramping your space. Without the contrived short bullet at the bottom, you’ve lost another third of the remaining slide space. And what is that logo doing there on every slide? Do your people really need a constant reminder of who they work for or which company is presenting to them? A logo belongs only on your welcome slide. Have this showing for 10 minutes prior to the start of the presentation, and anyone wandering into the wrong room will as a result of your logo quickly realise their mistake and be on their way.
4. Typographically, there’s a lot going on for a single slide, including text oriented at three different angles. As a general rule, no more than two fonts should be used per slide (one for the heading, one for body text) and these ought to be consistent between slides. Any orientation other than horizontal, left to right should be used very sparingly for extreme emphasis and only once on any one slide. 
5. And what about the words themselves? Do they support what you will say, or do they replace it? To appropriate an old analogy, a PowerPoint slide should be used rather as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, rather than for illumination. If your slide says everything you are going to, just send the slides and stay in bed. The first two points could have said just, “Lead generation” and “servicing” instead of stealing the speaker’s thunder entirely.
6. When bullet points span more than one line like this, you should really put more white space in between them to make them stand out as individual items.
7. That last bullet point says an awful lot about the speaker, and nothing that’s good. A skilful speaker will not need this pseudo-cheerful, pseudo-jokey prompt because he will have created a fun element already. An unskilful one will find that the only humorous response this bullet provokes is ironic and at his expense.
8. While we’re on the subject of bullet points, they should be used sparingly. Slide after slide of the damned things is dreadfully tiring, ultimately resulting in a phenomenon known as ‘death by bullet point’ in which the audience’s attention leaves the room after three slides, followed after three more by their will to live.

Like most people who encounter PowerPoint for the first time, I was infatuated at first sight. Suddenly I had the power to create the sorts of wonderful presentations that in the early 90s were seen only on the television news.

But the more I've used it, and the more I've seen it used, the more I have come to realise how much skill is required to make PowerPoint work well for you. The honeymoon period ended. I've sat in front of too many 100-slide bullet-point presentations and too many full paragraphs rendered on-screen in 12-point Arial.

Over the coming days, I'll post a couple of inept slides or the sort I see all the time and explain why they are bad. In the process, I should be able to extract a few principles of good PowerPoint design.

The great economy of language which the bullet-point represents can often encourage writers to omit too much. Many is the time I’ve sat looking at a cryptic 3-word bulletpoint on a PowerPoint slide and thought, “What on earth does that mean?” Sometimes, such ambiguity is intentional; often, it is not.

The greatest example of this is the dropping of the definite articles which pepper the everyday language. Or, to render that last sentence in PowerPoint:

• Greatest example is dropping articles

The “articles” we are talking about, of course are all those instances of the word the , which grammarians call the “definite article”. (The word “a” is referred to as the “indefinite article”, by the way.) In bullet-point format (and in newspaper headlines, incidentally), it is customary to drop articles freely and let the nouns stand alone. But there are times when at least some of them absolutely need to be retained. For instance, there is a difference between “school” and “the school” that needs preserving; the former relates to all schools, perhaps the very concept of educating children, whereas the second clearly refers to one particular establishment. Consider the difference between, “School is appalling.” and “ The school is appalling.”

There is also the issue of what I call “internal articles”. When we change the cost of living to cost of living we have dropped a leading article. When, on the other hand, we change sign of the times to sign of times then we have dropped an internal article. I would argue that dropping a leading article will often be acceptable, whilst internal articles should usually be preserved. Why? Simply because when we remove words from inside a phrase like this, it is harder for the reader to put them back. However colloquially we speak, we will always use sign of the times in speech rather than sign of times , so I would argue that we should always retain the form in writing. Most people when reading turn the written words into ones they imagine being spoken in their heads, so the writer’s task is to facilitate this process, and preserving the internal articles is one way to do this.

Bullet points are now endemic to our communication. The bullet-point is almost the atom of ideas in that it cannot be further reduced without losing meaning. Retaining that meaning in the process is, of course, vital, and it is here where grammar has a real contribution to make.

The good news about the bullet-point is that it removes the need for virtually all punctuation. The idea is that if your bullet-point is long enough to need a comma, it is probably too long. Even a list of items which would traditionally have been separated by commas (items such as lists, recitations, inventories and roll-calls) is rendered not with commas, but with sub-bullets, thus:

• Items such as:
• lists
• recitations
• inventories
• roll-calls

Note an important grammatical point here. Where sub-bullets complete a grammatical structure begun in the parent like this, they shouldn’t start with a capital letter, since in grammatical terms they simply continue an existing sentence rather than beginning a new one. This can be a challenge, since Word and PowerPoint will usually seek to make capitalisation automatic for you, assuming that a bullet-point will always constitute a sentence. Fortunately, this option can be turned off globally through Tools/AutoCorrect.