Anyway

When I was chair­ing the XML Con­fer­ence, one of the things I tried very hard to con­vince speak­ers to do was to write up their talks as pro­ceed­ings, and not just use slides. The main reason for that was that 6 months after giv­ing a talk, often­times the speak­ers can’t fig­ure out what they meant with those slides, let alone people try­ing to make sense of them on their own. A writ­ten paper is much bet­ter at giv­ing people the inform­a­tion they’re look­ing for.

So I was inter­ested to see that Present­a­tion Zen recently wrote on the same topic. As the author says:

Power­Point is not the cause of bad busi­ness present­a­tions, but lazi­ness and poor writ­ing skills may be. The point is not to place more text within tiny slides inten­ded for images and visual dis­plays of data. The point is to first (usu­ally) cre­ate a well-written, detailed doc­u­ment. Do busi­ness people still know how to write?

Recently I’ve star­ted try­ing a dif­fer­ent way of cre­at­ing slide decks. I pull together a few slides with pic­tures or bul­lets, then write a doc­u­ment with gram­mat­ical Eng­lish, pic­tur­ing myself actu­ally giv­ing the talk, writ­ing what I plan to say. This leads to addi­tions and changes in the slides, and makes them more into the sup­port­ing visu­als that I think they should be. In the ideal case, I’d have time after the actual present­a­tion to edit the written-out talk to reflect what I really did say and pub­lish that together with the slides. I real­ise that the slides on their own often aren’t much use to any­one who wasn’t at the talk, or 6 months after­wards for any­one who was; that’s not always a prob­lem depend­ing on the audi­ence and the actual pur­pose of the talk.

I do know of people who put a lot of work into mak­ing their slide decks suit­able for teach­ing pur­poses on their own without sup­port­ing doc­u­ments; those people who are good at that often use extens­ive speaker’s notes. And they’re usu­ally also good at writ­ing those full-length papers. Which leads me to sus­pect that there is some­thing to the slide-deck style that is appeal­ing — maybe it’s the sense that you get the import­ant inform­a­tion in the bul­lets? Maybe it’s respond­ing to people’s lazi­ness in reading?