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?
I write my slide decks as headlines (complete sentences, each of which tells a story) and then improvise each talk around them. I’ve been told that people have learned the material from the slide decks just fine.
I agree with your approach Lauren. Used powerpoint is a bit like a used condom — alright if you happened to be there.
I work on an open source publishing system where we have integrated slide presentations with documents, not suitable for all situations but it lets you write in a word processor and embed simple slides in a document by wrapping bullet lists and images in a simple table microformat.
You can see it in action on this page on the ICE site. Click on the slide icon top-right to see a presentation view using pure HTML driven by Slideous, a derivative of Slidy.
I use a web browser to give presentations. There was a time, in 2006, when Firefox would let me drive one window from another. That is, I got two parallel sets of pages, one of speaker notes and the other of slides, and arranged so that I could project one window and read the other on the LCD. Advancing to the next page in the speaker notes also advanced the presented slide in the other window.
That arrangement worked wonderfully. And the set of speaker notes was easily turned into an essay that stands alone and is possibly useful (my slides usually aren’t as I tend to use them only for highlighting key points).
If I could get firefox to do that again, I’d definitely use that technique. Alas, my JavaScript stopped working at some point and I’ve never been able to reinvent any that did the right thing 🙁