I’m getting tired of PowerPoint slides. So are a lot of people.
Why? They are another tool that’s controlling us.
They are excruciatingly predictable.
We tend to use the slides as speaker prompts, not as aids to the audience.
An abundance of slides actually communicates the speaker’s insecurity.
We devote too much of our preparation time to tweaking the slides and therefore have yet another excuse not to rehearse.
Speakers turn away from the audience to read slides (and the audience can read faster than the speaker can talk).
Slides give the audience another place to look, instead of at the speaker.
Slides turn the speaker’s thoughts into bullet points and make his or her speech mechanical and predictable.
Finally, slides tend to divert the speaker from meaning to information.
Visual displays can be useful, but clear thinking and a forceful argument are far more important.