Reflect: Death by PowerPoint

[This section should take you around 10 minutes to complete]

PowerPoint can be a very effective way to deliver information to an audience, having several potential advantages over a more traditional ‘stand and deliver’ method of presenting where the speaker simply reads from a long text.

Unlike the traditional approach to information delivery, PowerPoints can engage the audience using several audio-visual resources; the simplest of these being changing slides.

Another Death by PowerPoint [Image], by freepic.com (https://www.activepresence.com/blog/the-death-by-powerpoint-myth).

But … there are also a few disadvantages to using PowerPoints, which can lead to what is commonly referred to as ‘death by PowerPoint’. The term ‘death by PowerPoint’ refers to:

… a phenomenon caused by the poor use of presentation software. Key contributors to death by PowerPoint include confusing graphics, slides with too much text and presenters whose idea of a good presentation is to read 40 slides out loud (TechTarget Contributor, 2013).

Accordingly, we can often tell exactly when ‘death by PowerPoint’ is happening, simply by looking at the audience and how they are reacting to the presentation.

PowerPoint [Image] by David Roberts, 2015, 2015. (https://inspiringsocsci.pressbooks.com/chapter/life-after-death-by-powerpoint/).

While we will look at how to best present a PowerPoint in the next topic, make sure that the construction of the PowerPoint itself, does not contribute to death by PowerPoint.