Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts.
I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images projected for a fraction of a second one after the other.
But no one has the patience for my storytelling style. Congratulations if you got this far, most people gave up if they didn’t grok my point in the first two sentences.
Yes slideware is ugly and low information and boring and insulting to the audience, but some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.
In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"
> In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated ...
Wow, do you really equate long prose with "generated content"? Long prose is novels, deep non-fiction books, long letters, and much more. You can like them or not. In comparison "generated content" is sugar-coated garbage, like way too many social media posts. There was never any point in reading such "generated content".
I wasn't clear enough and I agree: art cannot be replaced by LLM (although this is heavy disputed by AI believers). Consuming art also precludes reading summaries generated by LLMs.
My comment was about "utility" texts (this is a context of this discussion, I suppose) - my prediction is that we are going to write shorter and more condensed texts to avoid overhead of LLMs use in generating and summarising text.
But why should there be two polar opposites: utility & art? Even when reading comments on HN I appreciate a a well written narrative with clarity and cohesion, instead of an assorted stack of bullet points.
The idea is that good writing actually makes you think clearer (both writer & reader); it’s not just a nice to have.
If that was the case people wouldn't use LLMs to generate long text only to use the same LLMs to generate short summaries of it.
What I am saying is not that good writing is useless - rather that good writing is _hard_ and people are lazy. There is way more bad writing than good in the world. Bad writing will be replaced by LLMs which does not make sense because it is still bad - and useless.
Good writing is going to stay but since it is hard it is (still) going to be rare.
In the end my hope is that bad (and useless) writing is going to be replaced by short, dense and useful format.
Of course - this begs the question: what constitutes good writing? Pretty good estimation is that a good writing is the one that is - generally speaking - as information dense as possible (ie. there is nothing you can take away from it without loosing some important information). And we are back to square one - it does not make sense to write anything longer than necessary :)
To add to that, text has more of "authorial intent" (debates on the demise of which notwithstanding) than other media.
Consider the visual rebus, for example, which is open to interpretation and depends on commonality of context in both producer and consumer, contrasted to a rigorous argument, which depends onoy on commonality of (technical) jargon.
Video ends up conveying information thanks to narration, while the visuals assuage boredom. Like an Adam Curtis documentary: it's essentially an essay read out, with clips and music overlaid to keep the audience from realising they're told, rather than shown, the argument.
Having the talking points as aides memoire on screen is nice in that it charts the course of the argument, but the map is not the territory, and we end up with significant information loss and knowledge gap.
I think that moving from the message in itself to its summation (i.e. from text to bullets) creates a knowledge divide between the producer (who knows more) to the consumer (who has access to less and can only divine the rest).
Its not that they want to be spoon fed, that is the ever decreasing bandwidth available as info and complexity in environment keeps exploding.
As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.
Could it be that such increasing specialization (sales, accounting, coder, glue…) is driven in part by decreasing attention spans and ability to focus? Maybe nobody is able to exert significant deliberate cognitive processing on anything beyond a narrow slice that they are already comfortable with.
It's natural. Rate of change is increasing in all fields. So when teams can't keep up, another team is setup to handle whatever is new and then automatically you get divergence in expertise, between the two groups over time. If you specialize in selling on amazon you learn totally different things, than selling in a store. If you specialize in mobile app development, a gap grows with teams who work on web or desktop. Info Asymmetry and Knowledge Gaps between specialists keeps growing with time. So the glue people naturally emerge.
The number of books, blogs, papers, textbooks, monograph, tutorials, reports, comments that are worthwhile reading will only ever increase though. Today is as information-lite as we're going to get. I feel like it's only natural to try and condense all this data (usually in a lossy way).
I hate PowerPoint but bullet points could be quite information dense. They lose effectiveness past 6 bullets due to readability reasons, but I still prefer them over fluffy low signal prose. I think at the end of the day, it all depends on the writer. I got to the end of your comment just fine. But I cannot and will not get to the end of a corporate jargon filled report or ppt.
> some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.
That caste likes to say, "I have people that do that for me."
I can actualy cope quite well with the slides that have 5 words on. But typically in the organisations that I have worked for, people will cram 200 words on a slide and then droningly reads them out.
No matter how often I explain that 'people can either listen to what you are saying, or read the slide - pick one' - it doesn't really sink in
A recent colleague often gave my team feedback like that. But we listened to him and all our presentations were much better afterwards. I hope I've internalized that idea somewhat.
Possibly unpopular opinion: PowerPoint is just a tool, and most people not only suck at making slides but are poor storytellers to boot. If you are a good storyteller and can effectively use the medium (as in, not just dump a bunch of bullets on a slide), you can actually convey a lot of information in a combined slide + narrative format.
Also probably unpopular opinion: most people, in business anyways, don't use or even expect powerpoint to be aiding a typical "presentation". I think we conflate powerpoints in meetings as "presentations" just like a Ted Talk is a "presentation". In business, these types of presentations do take place but are hardly a tip of the iceberg in terms of all the powerpoints being made. Under the surface, the lion's share of powerpoints are just talking points for a meeting. They help give alignment on what they want to talk about, points they want to make during the meeting, structure their meeting flow, and importantly - they give people something to read before/after the meeting to and reference back to the meeting topics. They also serve as a medium for data sharing, eg. charts, tables, and such. It also anticipates and answers some questions amongst many other things.
Anyways, I'm not saying this excuses the quality of most of these things but imagine how much effort you'd put into a Ted Talk versus how much you'd put into a 30 minute meeting when you may only have a few days notice. Most meeting topics are simply boring, it's work, or someone else's domain of work, shouldn't need a ton of narrative fluff to make it digestible, and honestly most powerpoints I see in work in the last decade or so are adequate enough for their purposes. I just stopped being critical of people's powerpoint and storying telling skills long ago and try to focus on the discussion/content being made and what I need to take away/double click on.
And most power points in businesses are actually documents, or worse, dual-purpose artifacts that need to be used as both the presentation materials and an artifact, and fail at both.
I think a major part of being bad presenters is that they don't train but think that they can do well with just a quick go-over of the materials.
Becoming good takes a lot of hard work, lot of redoing of stuff. Just like becoming good at soccer is more than playing games. Many successful YouTubers have learned it's hard work to make good videos.
Like Penn&Teller said: The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.
if i'm giving a presentation, i always practice it several times and i always find flaws to fix up(there's no segue from this slide to this one, i need to reorder these so i can introduce X before talking about Y, etc).
but you have to practice the right way.
the terrible, long-winded, confusing presentations you've seen were most likely done by somebody that sees a presentations as merely "talking in front of a group" so their practice would be focused on memorizing lines/facts that want to say. they may sound polished, but it's not necessarily going to be good.
in order for your practice to actually help, you need to go through your presentation while maintaining a strong sense of empathy for the audience. you need to fight a constant battle against the 'curse of knowledge' and force yourself to honestly evaluate what you're doing from the perspective as a first-time listener.
This holds for everything. Everything is a tool and always stating "It's just a tool, people are using it wrong", doesn't constitute an argument. A tool should be judged on it's usefulness and if a tool is "misused" 90% of the time, it may be worth considering whether it is a good tool at what it aims to achieve.
While this criticises PowerPoint - I don't think it sufficiently outlines an alternative.
As someone that has tried to write a decision paper before rather than a PowerPoint deck, I found the main challenge was engagement (i.e. encouraging people to read it is a challenge, while a powerpoint can be walked through together).
I could present a spreadsheet, but that only addresses the financials or numbers and won't address the business context.
And if you go into a board meeting empty handed to talk about a large investment - good luck!
I think it's probably a case of horses-for-courses: Sometimes PowerPoint is a great format, other times it might not be, and like any format it can either be used well or poorly. The issue in the Columbia example wasn't PowerPoint per-se, it was that the managers weren't clear in their communication.
And while bullet points are poor in some ways - they are great in others. Distilling ideas down and making sure your list is MECE is part of clear communication and thinking.
I once had a great presentation about this very topic!
The presenter gave us both the Tufte book and a detailed handout.
The idea is that you use the PowerPoint like you would an overhead projector, details that would otherwise be on slides are better as a handout that people can read/annotate as they want.
This was part of a summer REU and focused on academic talks, and this all falls apart in a remote setting - but I think there are ways to capture the essence of this style on Zoom.
I'd add that you tend to need a presentation and a leave-behind format. And, in the real world, it's mostly not realistic to expect people to create both formats. Mostly. I've actually given a presentation and wrote a book on the topic. But I'm not going to do that routinely.
This is by Edward Tufte. If you haven't had the chance to check out Edward Tufte's other works, in particular, the Visual Display of Quantitative Information [1] then I highly suggest you do. Every time I see a horrible graphic in a research paper, I redirect authors to [1]. It ought to be a must-read for anyone wanting to create a graph. Seriously, if you intend to display information, read that book. It'll open your eyes to make you see the immense amount of waste of space and clutter that people introduce.
It's basically an ode to clear, cutter-less, data visualization. Check out this timetable [2] (horizontal lines: stations, vertical lines: hours, diagonal lines: trains), and your mind will be blown. It's compact, it gives you all the information you need, it can be navigated by your grandma (or your granddaughter) and it likely shows more information than most digital or paper-based system you have ever met, in a smaller format.
That said, I think it is possible my refusal to do cheeky ppt slides with smart art and fill them with graphs of real data instead has stunted my career growth into management.
One problem with both of these takes on powerpoint is they assume it will be presented in person. That's less often the case now. People present more often via teams or zoom and so a lot of the ideas (don't expect people to read and listen simultaneously) are not accurate anymore (half your viewers are audio only, more people get copies of the slides than make the original presentation). Remote vs in person are totally different beasts.
Neal Stephenson has a funny anecdote about explaining PowerPoint to a friend of his who had managed to be unaware of it until now, culminating in Stephenson's explanation "for people who can't communicate, it's what a dialysis machine is for people who don't have kidneys" [1].
This is the culmination of his response [2] to a question [3] in the Q&A period of a talk on his book tour for Seveneves [4]
Slides are cursed with multiple audiences and lifetimes. After an initial persuasive speech, perhaps some new initiative gains momentum, and the slides are often the first and only relic associated with The Project for quite some time. They are a cultural artifact onto which many beliefs, hopes and dreams are projected in ways that are not at all evident from their content. Minions are asked by their managers if this thing is actually possible or desirable. Vendors are asked to pitch in. If you’re very unlucky you’re asked to start estimating for the thing and you’re sat, puzzled, thinking “but this is just some bullet points?” Sometimes the detail only comes later once things are signed off and someone is made accountable, and it’s that poor soul’s job to go back and find out exactly what gaps everyone has filled in inside their heads.
I don’t actually think PowerPoint is responsible for all this, I think it’s just people are often too lazy to create more structure and depth at the right time, and transition to something else.
educational materials that were originally linked through a proper citation/credit acknowledgement, but thats how hyperlinks work -- its not like someone stole the only copy.
There's no single "style of PowerPoint". People use it for various, different, things, and if you look at a deck made for one purpose through the lens of another, it'll look atrociously bad.
You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make:
* Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of slides often have a single sentence, image, chart, or code block. Importantly, those slides carry no meaning/story by themselves - you can't look at that deck without the talk itself.
* Handouts, or material to send over email, etc., in which the slides themselves are a thing (you might not be there to talk about them, or you can expand some of it as a follow-up). Slides are tightly packed with information, which needs to be carefully organized. They're usually bottom-line up-front (google BLUF), with on-slide info organized in pyramid fashion (google MBB slide structure).
(Edit to add: people often want to reuse the same slide deck for both uses, compromise on it, and end up with the worst combination. Nobody wants to do things twice over).
Diametrically apart, optimized for different things; if you're skilled at making those, can be super-useful. Trouble is, it's a skill that very few people are tought how to do. We expect people to be able to create and deliver a presentation without teaching them how to do it.
So what most non-experts end up doing, is what's in the linked book excerpt:
* pick a template you like
* add a bunch of bullet points where each bullet point is a paragraph of text
* fumble about with creating a chart that's only obvious to you (visualisation is a different skill in itself!)
* read the slides, slowly, while having your backs turned to the audience
Yeah, that's torture.
But it's not caused by powerpoint, same like spam is not caused by email. It's not because slides are inherently a worse format than articles or books (different, yes, and not for the same thing). It's just that people legit don't know better.
A lot of the criticism from OP is assuming that the slides exists in a vacuum and that the slides are the presentation. Short bullets? Yeah? It's just a reminder of what was presented in the main talk. They are not supposed to contain the complete content. Now unfortunately, a lot of presenters do the same mistake, get nervous, forget what they were supposed to say and let the nerfed bullets do the talking. Worst style is when they know beforehand that this will happen and add more and longer bullets to compensate for it. Death by powerpoint, guaranteed.
That's not to say bullets are great, the 6 level columbia slide is absolutely horrendous and bullets should not be the first tool one reaches for, contrary to what powerpoint easily invites for. Prefer a good graphical visualization of the raw data and annotate it with insights to back up your main argument, then let your slides back up your talk instead of being driven by them.
There is also the argument that slide decks tend to outlive their verbal presentations, because we are too lazy to create both a slidedeck and a properly written paper. Resulting in confusing low density bullet-lists being shared around. Here, a information dense presentation help, but it's usually not enough and often forces compromises to the main presentation.
Yep. A "powerpoint" can be single Edward Tufte graph presented to a room for 30 seconds. Or it could be War and Peace pasted across 10,000 slides. There is no one thing to complain about. Reading this lowered my opinion of tufte, who I have always found great, but also very overrated.
In 80s I had to create in Harvard graphics, print on white paper for boss to QC ( he can't walk over to your desktop), rinse, repeat then finally get printed in transparencies.
I've loaned my hardcopy of this classic to many people in my industry. Regrettably it has not had any impact and Powerpoint still runs rampant. I am not a Tufte fanboy but this article hits perfectly.
When I was in my business development phase I was taught to make presentations for C-levels at Fortune 500 companies like this:
Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything.
Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that.
Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their intelligence.
---
At times in life Powerpoint has really been my medium, it is much easier for me to put together presentations by putting together various graphics and symbols in PP than anything else, and I've tried.
I’m a McKinsey consultant and this reads as kind of crazy. Nobody is ever doing anything with 50 distinct slides.
My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is getting your thesis up top. The title of a page needs to be the only thing people really need to read to understand what you’re trying to convey. The contents of the page are just the details of why you’re saying it.
Most people instinctively do this in reverse and have a page where they throw a visual onto the page and make the title of the page just an announcement of what the visual is; and then either verbally or with small text callouts explain why it matters.
McKinsey has a reputation for cataclysmically pointless powerpoints that trick the audience into thinking that they had a point. Could the style you are suggesting be connected to that reputation?
I can’t say I agree with that. Frankly even most of the haters will dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints.
In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages.
Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and concise.
* page one is a summary of pretty much every major point the deck will make
* if you only read the slide titles you’ll more or less recreate the summary on page one and get the story bit by bit
* if you want to understand that argument or question it you have the evidence for it on the same page
When done correctly it’s very much like reading good doc strings and collapsing or uncollapsing the function definitions to see the implementations
It’s the difference between good comments like
> sort the data by geospatial distance to the user
My partner and I were primarily targeting finance at that time.
I didn't always present 100% of the "big and dense" slide decks; we could get people into a dialogue early on that would give us an idea of what to show next, a bit like a "choose your own adventure" book.
(Overall our approach was super effective at getting people to talk about their business, my partner got me to read https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Question-Based-Selling-Powerf... We were always finding out about stuff we weren't supposed to know like the desktop virtualization program at a famously secretive hedge fund, the closely guarded data cleanup pipeline for a real estate data vendor, the time a four letter defense contractor was grasping at straws on a project for a three letter agency, ...)
Here's an example of a slide deck I would present to a general audience, in this case a local startup accelerator
which is not as information dense as one of my sales slides but when I give talks like that they always want me back. (Funny that one felt obsolete by the end of 2017 but I packed in enough neural network stuff that it seems a little prescient now... Like that time I gave a talk at the first thorium energy conference about the computational physics program that would lead to a reactor that was mostly standard stuff out of intro level textbooks but useful and correct if you want to down that path. I took the schedule of reactor development when the project was abandoned in the 1970s and shifted it up to the present. The crowd reacted viscerally that it would take that long to which my answer is "you've got to get started now"; I wound up with a test reactor circa 2025 and sure enough they are building one in China.)
I do think it would differ significantly if you were trying to garner interest. Flexibility would help vs. a more structured presentation.
I can’t say I like the linked deck too much. Titles with no thesis. Visuals that don’t demonstrate anything on their own. It can work for speaking over. But it doesn’t actually convey information.
It's not centered on a goal (other than getting more invitations to speak at conferences.) I'm not trying to persuade people to take a particular course of action unlike a consultant.
Somebody is going to go a talk like that and receive a bit more than they can absorb. They'll walk out with something that really sticks for them. It won't promote the feeling that "I took four days and spent $X to go to a conference and didn't get my money's worth."
Your statement of “dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints.” closely corresponds to my statement of “trick the audience into thinking they had a point”
I’m only skimming the article tbh but all of the slides I’m seeing look terrible and useless. I don’t see much text about reducing arguments to one sentence theses.
A one sentence thesis is good communication. That’s the point of a thesis statement. It’s the core idea behind most writing education. If you don’t have a clear thesis up front, then people have to divine what you’re trying to convey themselves bottom up from the arguments on the screen.
“Luring the listener into compliance” is frankly the reader’s problem. PowerPoints are presentations, not debate stimulus. They are generally intended for one person to convey information, not foster a group discussion. It would be very bad to blame the concept of a blog if you’re drawn in by persuasive writing to a false idea.
PowerPoints are bad when someone is using it and you can’t tell what they’re trying to tell you. Especially with regard to whether it has the verbal explanation or not.
You can both be right. Like LLMs, McKinsey offers a combination of competence and bullshit. It hires bright, young, and freshly educated people who can go at problems with energy and a toolbox of the latest tools. Yet, putting a young person in a role like that is an hierarchy-disrupting tactic which can be seen best in the Church of Scientology where they find the youngest staff member they can find to be an "ethics officer".
A primary social hierarchy (Scientology, a corporation, Mao-era China) might feel threatened by various secondary and informal hierarchies (people who practice "the tech" on their own and make changes, workers who have the knowledge of how to do the company's task in their heads but not written down, sysadmins who keep a file of anyone who could possibly help them solve problems in their organization or with their vendors, fox cults, ...)
An accusation that is frequently leveled at McKinsey is that management brings them on to "launder" things they want to do, what I can say is that your slide decks are not just seen by the systems thinkers who are running the show but they are also seen by the people that the people who are running the show want to persuade.
I can put together a good powerpoint presentation -- one that isn't just bullet points and fluff.
It takes me forever. It's like preparing for a talk at a tech conference. I spend hours and hours off the clock refining the slides, the script, and rehearsing the timing.
Nobody's going to put in that effort if they have to present multiple times per quarter, especially if they know that nobody cares and that it doesn't really matter anyway.
Some of Tufte's criticism of slide bullets is not specific to PowerPoint, but could be extended to software which work with nested nodes like Roam/Workflowy(software which I like). Workflowy, in fact, allows you to convert a tree of nodes into a linear presentation. Wittgenstein also wrote his classic books as numbered nodes (though not nested).
Indeed, this can also be seen as a critique of structured code editors vs text editing. Mathematics books also follow tree structure a bit, (Def 6.3.1, Example 6.3.2), though there often is some connecting narrative.
The point about oversimplification to fit into a single slide is specific to PowerPoint. But, the critique that organization into discrete nodes often skips over an underlying narrative or a causal structure which connects the nodes is more general.
What can be said in defense of discrete organization? Firstly, the overall narrative is not initially apparent. Listing the pieces together can help to discover this structure.
Secondly, in long essays, the larger point often gets buried in the details. This is especially true in mathematical works where the purpose of a complicated definition/result is only seen a long time later. This also happens in source code, where a lot of preprocessing obscures the central purpose of a function (though of course, source code is not a candidate for a report with sentences anyway).
By forcing these documents to become less dense, the narrative actually becomes more apparent. Whereas with a dense document, the reader's attention can wander away before the punchline.
One issue that Tufte seems to not discuss in the oversimplification critique is that attention/time is limited. Since an organization leader cant read all reports 3 levels down the ladder (either usual style reports or nested trees), there needs to be a strategy for marking specific reports as important and also to mark which details from the document need to be passed on to higher levels of decision making and which details should be only relevant to middle managers.
In the Columbia report, the problem is not oversimplification but that the critical conclusion was mentioned as a low level detail whereas a methodology of choosing a 'conservative' model became the heading.
Could a usual technical report have avoided this issue? The 'conservative' phrase could well have been a section heading and the damage indicated in sentence buried inside the section. But a technical report also has a 'Conclusion' section which could have forced the authors to state their position clearly. This 'Conclusion' section is implicitly a protocol for which information in the report has to be passed up to a higher level. IPCC Reports have a 'Summary for Policymakers' in discrete points (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/). Tufte, for some reason, doesn't like "Executive Summary".
I've worked on heavy PP based companies, and in companies that requires 5 minute 2 pagers.
Both are here to write (info dense) but having a proper narrative structure with the 2 pager communicates far more than the PowerPoint does. A narrative structure can also drop down to bullet points it needed.
I've seen plenty of 50 page PP decks that ended up with slides full of paragraphs, basically being the worst of all possible communication formats.
What’s the meeting about? That’s the more important question.
Is this a decision making meeting? Is there one person making the decision or several?
Is this instead informational in nature? Are people supposed to understand the gist from this and do deeper research afterwards? Or should they come to the presentation already informed in some way?
PowerPoint is primarily a method for the speaker to organize their story, and secondarily for the audience to have visual landmarks to aid memory.
If you do anything else, you’re probably not planning your meetings properly.
I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images projected for a fraction of a second one after the other.
But no one has the patience for my storytelling style. Congratulations if you got this far, most people gave up if they didn’t grok my point in the first two sentences.
Yes slideware is ugly and low information and boring and insulting to the audience, but some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.
Wow, do you really equate long prose with "generated content"? Long prose is novels, deep non-fiction books, long letters, and much more. You can like them or not. In comparison "generated content" is sugar-coated garbage, like way too many social media posts. There was never any point in reading such "generated content".
My comment was about "utility" texts (this is a context of this discussion, I suppose) - my prediction is that we are going to write shorter and more condensed texts to avoid overhead of LLMs use in generating and summarising text.
The idea is that good writing actually makes you think clearer (both writer & reader); it’s not just a nice to have.
What I am saying is not that good writing is useless - rather that good writing is _hard_ and people are lazy. There is way more bad writing than good in the world. Bad writing will be replaced by LLMs which does not make sense because it is still bad - and useless.
Good writing is going to stay but since it is hard it is (still) going to be rare.
In the end my hope is that bad (and useless) writing is going to be replaced by short, dense and useful format.
Of course - this begs the question: what constitutes good writing? Pretty good estimation is that a good writing is the one that is - generally speaking - as information dense as possible (ie. there is nothing you can take away from it without loosing some important information). And we are back to square one - it does not make sense to write anything longer than necessary :)
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16
Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video
Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.
Even still I couldn't quite get the result I wanted
Image link
https://chatgpt.com/share/67769bef-537c-800f-90ac-35a44747f0...
Consider the visual rebus, for example, which is open to interpretation and depends on commonality of context in both producer and consumer, contrasted to a rigorous argument, which depends onoy on commonality of (technical) jargon.
Video ends up conveying information thanks to narration, while the visuals assuage boredom. Like an Adam Curtis documentary: it's essentially an essay read out, with clips and music overlaid to keep the audience from realising they're told, rather than shown, the argument.
Having the talking points as aides memoire on screen is nice in that it charts the course of the argument, but the map is not the territory, and we end up with significant information loss and knowledge gap.
I think that moving from the message in itself to its summation (i.e. from text to bullets) creates a knowledge divide between the producer (who knows more) to the consumer (who has access to less and can only divine the rest).
It's pretty bourgie IMO.
As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.
I hate PowerPoint but bullet points could be quite information dense. They lose effectiveness past 6 bullets due to readability reasons, but I still prefer them over fluffy low signal prose. I think at the end of the day, it all depends on the writer. I got to the end of your comment just fine. But I cannot and will not get to the end of a corporate jargon filled report or ppt.
That caste likes to say, "I have people that do that for me."
I've never been able to articulate why I couldn't stand Wired so succinctly! Thankyou
No matter how often I explain that 'people can either listen to what you are saying, or read the slide - pick one' - it doesn't really sink in
Anyways, I'm not saying this excuses the quality of most of these things but imagine how much effort you'd put into a Ted Talk versus how much you'd put into a 30 minute meeting when you may only have a few days notice. Most meeting topics are simply boring, it's work, or someone else's domain of work, shouldn't need a ton of narrative fluff to make it digestible, and honestly most powerpoints I see in work in the last decade or so are adequate enough for their purposes. I just stopped being critical of people's powerpoint and storying telling skills long ago and try to focus on the discussion/content being made and what I need to take away/double click on.
Becoming good takes a lot of hard work, lot of redoing of stuff. Just like becoming good at soccer is more than playing games. Many successful YouTubers have learned it's hard work to make good videos.
Like Penn&Teller said: The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.
but you have to practice the right way.
the terrible, long-winded, confusing presentations you've seen were most likely done by somebody that sees a presentations as merely "talking in front of a group" so their practice would be focused on memorizing lines/facts that want to say. they may sound polished, but it's not necessarily going to be good.
in order for your practice to actually help, you need to go through your presentation while maintaining a strong sense of empathy for the audience. you need to fight a constant battle against the 'curse of knowledge' and force yourself to honestly evaluate what you're doing from the perspective as a first-time listener.
As someone that has tried to write a decision paper before rather than a PowerPoint deck, I found the main challenge was engagement (i.e. encouraging people to read it is a challenge, while a powerpoint can be walked through together).
I could present a spreadsheet, but that only addresses the financials or numbers and won't address the business context.
And if you go into a board meeting empty handed to talk about a large investment - good luck!
I think it's probably a case of horses-for-courses: Sometimes PowerPoint is a great format, other times it might not be, and like any format it can either be used well or poorly. The issue in the Columbia example wasn't PowerPoint per-se, it was that the managers weren't clear in their communication.
And while bullet points are poor in some ways - they are great in others. Distilling ideas down and making sure your list is MECE is part of clear communication and thinking.
The presenter gave us both the Tufte book and a detailed handout.
The idea is that you use the PowerPoint like you would an overhead projector, details that would otherwise be on slides are better as a handout that people can read/annotate as they want.
This was part of a summer REU and focused on academic talks, and this all falls apart in a remote setting - but I think there are ways to capture the essence of this style on Zoom.
I'd add that you tend to need a presentation and a leave-behind format. And, in the real world, it's mostly not realistic to expect people to create both formats. Mostly. I've actually given a presentation and wrote a book on the topic. But I'm not going to do that routinely.
It's basically an ode to clear, cutter-less, data visualization. Check out this timetable [2] (horizontal lines: stations, vertical lines: hours, diagonal lines: trains), and your mind will be blown. It's compact, it gives you all the information you need, it can be navigated by your grandma (or your granddaughter) and it likely shows more information than most digital or paper-based system you have ever met, in a smaller format.
[1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/book/the-visual-display-of-quant... [2] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/0*8zW...
That said, I think it is possible my refusal to do cheeky ppt slides with smart art and fill them with graphs of real data instead has stunted my career growth into management.
This is the culmination of his response [2] to a question [3] in the Q&A period of a talk on his book tour for Seveneves [4]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE#t=40m20s
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE#t=38m46s
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE#t=38m06s
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHF6vDv8AE
I don’t actually think PowerPoint is responsible for all this, I think it’s just people are often too lazy to create more structure and depth at the right time, and transition to something else.
You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make:
* Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of slides often have a single sentence, image, chart, or code block. Importantly, those slides carry no meaning/story by themselves - you can't look at that deck without the talk itself.
* Handouts, or material to send over email, etc., in which the slides themselves are a thing (you might not be there to talk about them, or you can expand some of it as a follow-up). Slides are tightly packed with information, which needs to be carefully organized. They're usually bottom-line up-front (google BLUF), with on-slide info organized in pyramid fashion (google MBB slide structure).
(Edit to add: people often want to reuse the same slide deck for both uses, compromise on it, and end up with the worst combination. Nobody wants to do things twice over).
Diametrically apart, optimized for different things; if you're skilled at making those, can be super-useful. Trouble is, it's a skill that very few people are tought how to do. We expect people to be able to create and deliver a presentation without teaching them how to do it.
So what most non-experts end up doing, is what's in the linked book excerpt:
* pick a template you like
* add a bunch of bullet points where each bullet point is a paragraph of text
* fumble about with creating a chart that's only obvious to you (visualisation is a different skill in itself!)
* read the slides, slowly, while having your backs turned to the audience
Yeah, that's torture.
But it's not caused by powerpoint, same like spam is not caused by email. It's not because slides are inherently a worse format than articles or books (different, yes, and not for the same thing). It's just that people legit don't know better.
That's not to say bullets are great, the 6 level columbia slide is absolutely horrendous and bullets should not be the first tool one reaches for, contrary to what powerpoint easily invites for. Prefer a good graphical visualization of the raw data and annotate it with insights to back up your main argument, then let your slides back up your talk instead of being driven by them.
There is also the argument that slide decks tend to outlive their verbal presentations, because we are too lazy to create both a slidedeck and a properly written paper. Resulting in confusing low density bullet-lists being shared around. Here, a information dense presentation help, but it's usually not enough and often forces compromises to the main presentation.
Sure there is: https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
Powerpoint presentations have a distinct content and character arising from the medium. The style of powerpoint is:
* 3-5 Bullet points in a big font
* Plot with no more than 8 data points* Prepared and researched in advance, nothing off-the-cuff
* No corrections or clarifications or shifts in focus, it's not possible to edit slides on the fly
* One person 'on stage' with a clicker while everyone else listens quietly
* I don't know if this video is going to play or not
* afterward you might think yourself successful if someone "asks for the slides"
Unless his boss has more changes.
Now it's so easy to create so much crap.
Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything.
Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that.
Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their intelligence.
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At times in life Powerpoint has really been my medium, it is much easier for me to put together presentations by putting together various graphics and symbols in PP than anything else, and I've tried.
My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is getting your thesis up top. The title of a page needs to be the only thing people really need to read to understand what you’re trying to convey. The contents of the page are just the details of why you’re saying it.
Most people instinctively do this in reverse and have a page where they throw a visual onto the page and make the title of the page just an announcement of what the visual is; and then either verbally or with small text callouts explain why it matters.
In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages.
Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and concise.
* page one is a summary of pretty much every major point the deck will make
* if you only read the slide titles you’ll more or less recreate the summary on page one and get the story bit by bit
* if you want to understand that argument or question it you have the evidence for it on the same page
When done correctly it’s very much like reading good doc strings and collapsing or uncollapsing the function definitions to see the implementations
It’s the difference between good comments like
> sort the data by geospatial distance to the user
And classic bad ones like
> sort function
I didn't always present 100% of the "big and dense" slide decks; we could get people into a dialogue early on that would give us an idea of what to show next, a bit like a "choose your own adventure" book.
(Overall our approach was super effective at getting people to talk about their business, my partner got me to read https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Question-Based-Selling-Powerf... We were always finding out about stuff we weren't supposed to know like the desktop virtualization program at a famously secretive hedge fund, the closely guarded data cleanup pipeline for a real estate data vendor, the time a four letter defense contractor was grasping at straws on a project for a three letter agency, ...)
Here's an example of a slide deck I would present to a general audience, in this case a local startup accelerator
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...
which is not as information dense as one of my sales slides but when I give talks like that they always want me back. (Funny that one felt obsolete by the end of 2017 but I packed in enough neural network stuff that it seems a little prescient now... Like that time I gave a talk at the first thorium energy conference about the computational physics program that would lead to a reactor that was mostly standard stuff out of intro level textbooks but useful and correct if you want to down that path. I took the schedule of reactor development when the project was abandoned in the 1970s and shifted it up to the present. The crowd reacted viscerally that it would take that long to which my answer is "you've got to get started now"; I wound up with a test reactor circa 2025 and sure enough they are building one in China.)
I can’t say I like the linked deck too much. Titles with no thesis. Visuals that don’t demonstrate anything on their own. It can work for speaking over. But it doesn’t actually convey information.
Somebody is going to go a talk like that and receive a bit more than they can absorb. They'll walk out with something that really sticks for them. It won't promote the feeling that "I took four days and spent $X to go to a conference and didn't get my money's worth."
A one sentence thesis is good communication. That’s the point of a thesis statement. It’s the core idea behind most writing education. If you don’t have a clear thesis up front, then people have to divine what you’re trying to convey themselves bottom up from the arguments on the screen.
“Luring the listener into compliance” is frankly the reader’s problem. PowerPoints are presentations, not debate stimulus. They are generally intended for one person to convey information, not foster a group discussion. It would be very bad to blame the concept of a blog if you’re drawn in by persuasive writing to a false idea.
PowerPoints are bad when someone is using it and you can’t tell what they’re trying to tell you. Especially with regard to whether it has the verbal explanation or not.
A primary social hierarchy (Scientology, a corporation, Mao-era China) might feel threatened by various secondary and informal hierarchies (people who practice "the tech" on their own and make changes, workers who have the knowledge of how to do the company's task in their heads but not written down, sysadmins who keep a file of anyone who could possibly help them solve problems in their organization or with their vendors, fox cults, ...)
An accusation that is frequently leveled at McKinsey is that management brings them on to "launder" things they want to do, what I can say is that your slide decks are not just seen by the systems thinkers who are running the show but they are also seen by the people that the people who are running the show want to persuade.
It takes me forever. It's like preparing for a talk at a tech conference. I spend hours and hours off the clock refining the slides, the script, and rehearsing the timing.
Nobody's going to put in that effort if they have to present multiple times per quarter, especially if they know that nobody cares and that it doesn't really matter anyway.
Indeed, this can also be seen as a critique of structured code editors vs text editing. Mathematics books also follow tree structure a bit, (Def 6.3.1, Example 6.3.2), though there often is some connecting narrative.
The point about oversimplification to fit into a single slide is specific to PowerPoint. But, the critique that organization into discrete nodes often skips over an underlying narrative or a causal structure which connects the nodes is more general.
What can be said in defense of discrete organization? Firstly, the overall narrative is not initially apparent. Listing the pieces together can help to discover this structure.
Secondly, in long essays, the larger point often gets buried in the details. This is especially true in mathematical works where the purpose of a complicated definition/result is only seen a long time later. This also happens in source code, where a lot of preprocessing obscures the central purpose of a function (though of course, source code is not a candidate for a report with sentences anyway).
By forcing these documents to become less dense, the narrative actually becomes more apparent. Whereas with a dense document, the reader's attention can wander away before the punchline.
One issue that Tufte seems to not discuss in the oversimplification critique is that attention/time is limited. Since an organization leader cant read all reports 3 levels down the ladder (either usual style reports or nested trees), there needs to be a strategy for marking specific reports as important and also to mark which details from the document need to be passed on to higher levels of decision making and which details should be only relevant to middle managers.
In the Columbia report, the problem is not oversimplification but that the critical conclusion was mentioned as a low level detail whereas a methodology of choosing a 'conservative' model became the heading.
Could a usual technical report have avoided this issue? The 'conservative' phrase could well have been a section heading and the damage indicated in sentence buried inside the section. But a technical report also has a 'Conclusion' section which could have forced the authors to state their position clearly. This 'Conclusion' section is implicitly a protocol for which information in the report has to be passed up to a higher level. IPCC Reports have a 'Summary for Policymakers' in discrete points (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/). Tufte, for some reason, doesn't like "Executive Summary".
Both are here to write (info dense) but having a proper narrative structure with the 2 pager communicates far more than the PowerPoint does. A narrative structure can also drop down to bullet points it needed.
I've seen plenty of 50 page PP decks that ended up with slides full of paragraphs, basically being the worst of all possible communication formats.
What’s the meeting about? That’s the more important question.
Is this a decision making meeting? Is there one person making the decision or several?
Is this instead informational in nature? Are people supposed to understand the gist from this and do deeper research afterwards? Or should they come to the presentation already informed in some way?
PowerPoint is primarily a method for the speaker to organize their story, and secondarily for the audience to have visual landmarks to aid memory.
If you do anything else, you’re probably not planning your meetings properly.