The Uses & Abuses of Slides, Part 2: SLIDES ROCK! - Strategies for Communication with Slides
Summary
TLDRThis video explores the dual nature of PowerPoint presentations. While Part 1 highlighted PowerPoint's flaws—being formulaic and overused—Part 2 emphasizes its strengths when used effectively. The speaker introduces concepts like 'information resolution' and discusses how slides can enhance business communication. The video covers three key uses of PowerPoint: as a visual aid, a standalone document, and a speaker prompt. By focusing on vertical and horizontal logic, presenters can craft compelling presentations that convey clear, audience-oriented messages. Ultimately, PowerPoint is portrayed as a powerful medium when purposefully used.
Takeaways
- 📈 PowerPoint can be both a powerful tool and a source of frustration in business communication.
- 🔍 Edward Tufte's concept of 'information resolution' suggests that PowerPoint encourages limited thinking, which may not be suitable for complex topics.
- 🚀 For complex decisions, such as assessing the safety of a space shuttle, a higher resolution medium like a detailed report might be more appropriate.
- 💡 PowerPoint slides are best for initial presentations or pitching ideas where high information density is not necessary.
- 📊 'Information resolution' refers to the density of information in a medium, not the sharpness of images.
- 📖 Media theorist Ian Bogost suggests understanding a medium by its variety of uses, implying that PowerPoint is versatile and not inherently flawed.
- 🎯 There are three main uses of PowerPoint: as a visual aid, a standalone document, and a speaker prompt.
- 👥 Visual aids are audience-oriented, meant to support and enhance the oral presentation.
- 📚 Standalone documents use slides as a publishing medium to convey all information through the slides themselves.
- 🗣️ Speaker prompts are speaker-oriented and generally less effective as they serve as an outline for the presenter rather than engaging the audience.
- 📝 Before creating slides, establish your audience and message to ensure that slides are being used appropriately and effectively.
- 🔄 Understand 'slide logic', which includes both vertical logic (information within a slide) and horizontal logic (the flow from one slide to the next).
Q & A
What was discussed in part one of the presentation?
-In part one, the presenter discussed why PowerPoint is often seen as ineffective. It was highlighted that PowerPoint is formulaic, overused, applied in cliché ways, and often doesn't help the audience understand the message effectively.
What is the main goal of part two of this presentation?
-The main goal of part two is to explain why PowerPoint can be a powerful and effective medium for business communication when used correctly, and to provide strategies for communicating effectively with slides.
Who is Edward Tufte, and what was his criticism of PowerPoint?
-Edward Tufte is an information design expert who critiqued PowerPoint's cognitive style. He suggested that PowerPoint encourages limited thinking and may not be suitable for conveying complex, high-resolution information, such as engineering data for critical decisions.
What is 'information resolution,' and how does it relate to PowerPoint?
-'Information resolution' refers to the density of information conveyed in a medium. In the context of PowerPoint, it means how much and how clearly ideas are communicated. Depending on the situation, slides can have high or low information resolution to match the needs of the message.
What are the three main uses of PowerPoint discussed in the presentation?
-The three main uses of PowerPoint are: (1) Visual Aid, which enhances an oral presentation, (2) Standalone Document, where the slides convey the entire message independently, and (3) Speaker Prompt, which serves as a teleprompter for the speaker.
Why is the 'Speaker Prompt' method considered less effective?
-The 'Speaker Prompt' method is considered less effective because it is speaker-oriented rather than audience-oriented. The slides primarily help the speaker, making the presentation less engaging and informative for the audience.
What does the term 'vertical logic' mean in the context of slide design?
-In slide design, 'vertical logic' refers to the relationship of information within a single slide. The main message or summary should be placed at the top, and supporting information should be organized underneath, ensuring clarity and emphasis on the key points.
How does 'horizontal logic' differ from 'vertical logic'?
-'Horizontal logic' refers to the flow and connection of ideas from one slide to the next. It's about ensuring that each slide builds upon the previous one, creating a coherent and logical narrative throughout the presentation.
Why should slides not be an automatic choice for every presentation?
-Slides should not be an automatic choice because their effectiveness depends on the purpose and audience of the message. If slides do not enhance or convey the message more effectively than other mediums, they might not be the best option.
What advice does the presenter give for using slides effectively?
-The presenter advises focusing on being audience-oriented, establishing the purpose and main idea before designing slides, using vertical and horizontal logic, and considering the resolution of the information to ensure that slides enhance the communication of the message.
Outlines
📊 The Power and Pitfalls of PowerPoint
This paragraph discusses the dual nature of PowerPoint as both a hindering and enhancing tool in business communication. It acknowledges PowerPoint's formulaic and overused nature, which can lead to clichéd presentations that obscure the message. However, it also highlights PowerPoint's potential as an effective medium when used correctly, emphasizing the concept of 'information resolution' introduced by Edward Tufte. This concept suggests that the choice between high and low information resolution should be made based on the context, such as detailed reports for complex decisions versus initial pitches that benefit from lower resolution. The paragraph sets the stage for exploring strategies to leverage PowerPoint effectively.
🎯 Understanding PowerPoint's Versatility
The second paragraph delves into the various uses of PowerPoint, emphasizing its versatility as a medium. It introduces the idea that PowerPoint can serve as a visual aid to enhance oral presentations, a standalone document for publishing complete information, or a speaker prompt to guide lectures. The paragraph stresses the importance of being audience-oriented and understanding the purpose and audience for the message before deciding to use slides. It also introduces the concept of slide logic, differentiating between vertical logic, which organizes information within a slide, and horizontal logic, which connects one slide to the next, building a narrative. The goal is to avoid making slides a crutch for the speaker and instead use them to effectively convey the intended message to the audience.
💡 Maximizing the Impact of Slides
The final paragraph concludes the discussion by reiterating the power of slides when used correctly. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the audience and the purpose of the message to decide the appropriate use of slides. The paragraph also touches on the importance of slide logic, where vertical logic should summarize the main point at the top of the slide, and horizontal logic should create a coherent narrative across slides. The speaker encourages embracing the power of slides as a common and powerful form of business communication, capable of combining text and images in compelling ways. The advice is to think critically about the use of slides, ensuring they serve to enhance understanding and communication rather than detract from it.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡PowerPoint
💡Information Resolution
💡Edward Tufte
💡Visual Aid
💡Standalone Document
💡Speaker Prompt
💡Narrative
💡Vertical Logic
💡Horizontal Logic
💡Audience-Oriented
💡Big Idea
Highlights
PowerPoint can be an effective medium for business communication when used well.
Edward Tufte introduced the concept of information resolution, suggesting that PowerPoint encourages limited thinking.
Higher resolution is necessary for complex messages, while lower resolution is suitable for initial presentations or idea pitching.
Information resolution refers to the density of information conveyed, not the sharpness of images.
Slides have varying information resolution depending on their purpose.
Slides can sometimes detract from the message instead of helping it.
Ian Bogost's quote emphasizes understanding the relevance of a medium by looking at the variety of things it does.
PowerPoint is a powerful medium that can be recovered from its critics by embracing its variety of uses.
There are three basic uses of PowerPoint: visual aid, standalone document, and speaker prompt.
Visual aids are audience-oriented and meant to enhance an oral presentation.
Standalone documents use PowerPoint as a publishing medium to communicate all information through the slides.
Speaker prompt uses slides as a teleprompter, which is generally not recommended as it's not audience-oriented.
Slides can be a powerful tool when used with an audience-oriented approach.
Before designing slides, establish the audience and the message to be conveyed.
Slides should not be an automatic go-to; they should be used for a specific reason.
Vertical slide logic is the relationship of information within a given slide, often starting with the main point.
Horizontal slide logic is the relationship of one slide to the next, building a narrative or story.
Slides can combine text and images in interesting ways to create compelling visual aids and documents.
Understanding the audience and purpose is key to using PowerPoint effectively.
Transcripts
all right
welcome to part two of the uses and
abuses of
powerpoint now in the last one we talked
about why
powerpoint sucks and we looked at it's
the fact that it's formulaic
that it's overused that it's used in
cliche ways
and it's often used in ways that don't
help the
audience understand your message
so this section we want to look at why
it's an awesome medium to use for
business communication and if we do it
well
it works really well
so so let's do part two
slides rock strategies for communicating
with slides
so in the last section we introduced
this concept of
information resolution edward tufte
introduced it
an edward softie right is the person who
was critiquing
powerpoint's cognitive style he was
suggesting that powerpoint encourages
limited thinking and so if you are an
engineer trying to decide whether space
shuttle is safe to re-enter
or not due to the foam damage foam tile
damage
maybe you need a higher resolution
medium maybe you should write a report
or maybe you should think about how
you're using slides in a different way
in order to convey information to
management so there's plenty of
scenarios in which higher resolution is
necessary for conveying
a message there are other situations
where lower resolution is really good if
you're pitching an idea
or just giving an initial presentation
slides can be really awesome because you
don't need that high of a resolution
so we want to think about when
resolution is really important to our
message
high resolution and when you know slide
resolution lower resolution is
okay so resolution does not refer to how
sharp your images are but rather how
sharp your ideas are and how much
information you can convey so this is
information
resolution the density of information
in a particular medium
so we learned a couple things from the
last
from the first part of this presentation
we looked at a couple different kinds of
slides where we saw different levels of
density and different levels of
effectiveness and we learned one
that slides have a varying information
resolution depending on their purpose
so slides can have higher or lower
resolution
and two slides don't always help the
message in fact very often slides don't
help or message so how do we make it so
that
the slide is helping our message
furthering our message and not
detracting from it or creating
unnecessary
noise i want to take a look um at this
quote from the media theorist ian bogos
he wrote a book called how to do things
with video games which is a very short
little book that i highly recommend
but he's a media theorist and he says
this we can understand the relevance of
a medium by looking
at the variety of things it does i think
this quote is interesting because it's
going to help us recover powerpoint from
its critics a little bit and say you
know what slides are actually a very
good
medium a powerful medium in fact frank
from or the other critic from before
said that
powerpoint is a powerful medium so let's
talk about what that means
bogus goes on to say this it's a longer
quote but bear with me because it's a
nice example
he says think of all the things you can
do with a photograph you can document
the atrocities and celebrations of war
as did photojournalists like eddie adams
and alfred eisenstadt
you can record fleeting moments in time
as the photographers like
henry cartier-bresson and robert frank
you can capture the ordinary moments of
family life as all of us do at birthday
parties or holidays for an
album or shoebox archive you can take a
snapshot reminder of a home improvement
project
to help you buy the right part at the
hardware store an automated camera at a
street intersection can capture a
license plate for ticketing and a
pornographer can capture a naked body
for titillation
photography has common properties it
bends light
through an aperture to expose an
emulsion or digital sensor
but the uses of photography vary widely
it is this breadth and depth of uses
that make
that makes photography a mature medium
so here he is using photography as an
example of what a mature medium might
look like and in this book that
this comes from he's trying to make the
argument that video games are also going
to be a mature medium and that we
shouldn't limit our understanding of
video games just based on a few games
but rather look at the medium itself and
what it can do
i want to argue that that's what we
should do with slides too slides are a
super important form of communication
and business and all kinds of
industries and so we need to think about
the variety of things powerpoint is good
at and i think when we embrace what
powerpoint is good at we get
good at powerpoint so let's jump into
some ideas about that
there are three basic uses of powerpoint
there might be more but for now we'll
look at these three
right the first one is visual aid the
second one is
standalone document and you should
recognize both of those because you're
going to be using them
visual aids will be important in your
persuasive speech and the standalone
document
is really important when you write your
research deck and then the third one is
speaker prompt
which you've probably seen people like
me and other professors use all the time
when that's when you have slides
as you're kind of prompt for giving your
lecture
in the visual aid category visual you
know
the point of the slide is to visually
enhance an oral presentation so i'm up
giving a speech and i have slides behind
me that are supposed to help you the
audience understand what i'm saying
it's an audience oriented use of
powerpoint
the slides help the message i have a
message i want to say and the slides are
there behind me
to help reinforce that message
with the standalone document you're
basically using powerpoint as a
publishing medium you're trying to make
something that you can publish as a
document
standalone documents they communicate
all the information through the slides
they're not meant to be presented
they're all inside the slides and
they're meant to be read
not presented the slides in this case
are the message
so in the first example of visual aids
the slides help the message
when we have a standalone document the
slides are the message there's no other
deliverer of the message and then the
last one and this is not one we will be
practicing in this class at all and in
fact this is probably one to avoid in
general although i'm guilty of doing it
is the speaker prompt method that's when
you use
powerpoint as a teleprompter for the
speaker and it's speaker oriented not
audience oriented which is why we want
to
avoid it we almost always want to be
audience oriented
and this is when the slides are helping
the speaker
right so and i like i said i'm guilty of
this this is when
if you have uh you know you give lots of
lectures in a day you need that
you need the slides to sort of help
guide you through the lecture remind you
where you're at and give you kind of an
outline
and usually that's not a very effective
use of slides because it becomes quite
boring for the audience because the
sides aren't really there for the
audience they're there for the speaker
so there are three uses one used to help
the message
another use where the slide is the
message and finally
a use of slides where the slides are
helping the speaker
as a prompt and as i said we want to
focus on the first two because these are
the two that you're going to be doing a
lot of and they're very different uses
of slides so we want to be aware of the
fact that when we're making visual aids
we're we're engaging in something quite
different than when we're trying to make
powerpoint into a publishing medium for
our standalone document
two two very different uses so slides
rock slides can be awesome slides are
super powerful tools that are both a
visual medium and a publishing document
medium at the same time
they can have varying resolution they
can be very sparse in terms of
information
and really just reinforce some other
thing like a presentation
or they can be the point of the whole
message and carry the whole message
as in the form of a standalone document
so slides are really powerful media
so how do we use them better how do we
stop ourselves from sucking at
powerpoint
and so you know part of this is the just
the overall philosophy of being audience
oriented so
before you can start to design slides
you have to establish the so
what who is your audience and what are
you trying to say why are you trying to
say it
what is that what is the point what is
the big idea you're trying to get across
and
who is the intended audience for that
idea
and without establishing those first
then you will be lost in how you use
slides you will not be motivated and why
you're doing what you're doing
so you have to settle up that so what
part before you even get into what we
might call
the what and the what is what am i going
to say
and through which media on what platform
am i going to say it
and so if you're wondering whether to
use slides
in a certain context don't just use them
because everyone uses slides
think about why you're using them am i
using them because they're a crutch for
me
as a speaker or am i using them because
they're really important information
that i want to convey to the audience
and i think the slides will help me
what what message do you have what
resolution does that message need to be
at
uh in order to get your point across
and then ask yourself are slides part of
the picture of how i want to put it put
together this message
so slides should not be an automatic
go-to
um this should be something that are
that you're using for a reason because
you've decided that the purpose of your
message and the audience for your
message
uh are such that slides will help so
just a couple of things to know when you
are using slides that there are a couple
of things to know about slide logics so
there are two kinds of logic we're going
to talk about with slides one is
vertical logic and one is horizontal
logic
so let's jump back first to classical
logic you might recognize this very
famous
syllogism syllogism is a logical
statement and it comes from classical
greek rhetoric right
it goes like this all humans die
socrates
is a human therefore socrates will
die that's right right so it's a it's
it's got a set of premises and then a
conclusion
and and you can see here i have an arrow
for pointing down because this is
there's a downward trajectory to this
logic where we start with the premises
and then we come to a conclusion
that's classical logic now let's look at
vertical slide logic
vertical slide logic is the relationship
of information to itself
within a given slide and if we were to
make a slide of the previous syllogism
we'd want to reverse
things right so one of the points of how
we organize slides is to put the summary
at the top
if you think back to that columbia slide
from the tufty criticism
one of the problems with that slide was
that the conclusion was buried at the
bottom of the slide when really that was
the main message the main message being
that we do not have enough test data to
know whether the tiles were damaged
that should have been at the top of this
slide so with slides we want to keep
the big takeaways at the top not at the
bottom so if we were to
turn that syllogism into a slide we
wanted to go the opposite direction we'd
put at the top
in big letters socrates will die and
then
fill it in afterwards with some of the
information
that helps make that clear right so
socrates will die and then
the rest of the slide unfolds the
premises and evidence and things like
that that you have
to to prove that out right so that's
part of a summary heading is to get to
the point
so vertical slide logic often runs
opposite of how we think about
classical logic and of course not every
slide is
literally a classical logic like this
but that you want your big takeaway your
main point your conclusion to be the big
message
the big takeaway and then the rest of
the slide fills in
that horizontal slide logic is the
relationship of one slide to the next
slide so
vertical logic is the relationship of
the information within a given slide
and horizontal logic its relationship of
one slide to another so when we're
talking about
something like a research deck the
horizontal logic is how the deck
flows how the ideas build upon each
other how the organization
makes it you know makes sense and things
like that
i like to think of horizontal side logic
as the story your deck tells that's why
i don't have any more that
that classical greek syllogism there but
rather i have
the beginning of star wars right because
this is more of the narrative this is
how your deck builds
its story its big message so horizontal
logic has to do with what comes next a
long time ago in a galaxy
far far away it is a period of civil war
rebel spaceship striking etc the opening
credits of star wars if you're familiar
with it right
that's narrative that's building a story
so each individual slide needs to have
its own vertical logic where
the top level header summarizes what's
on the
what's on the slide and the slide
unfolds evidence in an interesting way
but then the relationship of one slide
to the next slide is the horizontal
logic so after you've established
point a on on slide a now you're going
to move to point b
on slide b what's the link in the
connection between them if i were to
read all of your summary headings across
every slide what would there start to be
a a story
that develops that's building your
message
right so that's horizontal slide logic
all right that concludes part 2
slides rock i hope this gives you some
philosophical understanding or some
general principles for thinking about
why slides are effective and what the
risks are when using slides so
slides can be formulaic and boring and
not convey the information they need to
or they can be wonderful tools that are
really powerful tools for communicating
a business
and in this class we want to embrace the
power of slides
because they are a really common form of
communication and a really powerful
medium and what's great about them is
their ability to combine
text and images in interesting ways you
don't have to be an expert in layout to
put together very compelling
relationships between text and image
and varying levels of resolution and so
we can make really interesting documents
and visual aids when we think about our
audience and understand our purpose
and use powerpoint to enhance our
understanding of our audience and our
purpose
so hopefully this helps you think about
in a broad sense
how to think about slides and use slides
in your business communication
all right
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