Want to Improve Science Communication? Start with Bad PowerPoint Habits
Source: Oran Viriyincy/Creative Commons
The latest AAAS meeting made me think a lot about science communication, and also a seeming paradox: science conferences these days are all about improving it; but frankly, science conferences are also a place to see lots of bad presentations.
This triggered a long piece at DeSmogBlog about misuses of PowerPoint–chiefly, the use of wordy slides, which are really almost never justifiable–and how scientific conferences could stamp out such misuses through some simple changes in technological requirements and setup.
An excerpt:
A cardinal sin of PowerPoint is putting lots of tiny words up on the screen, and then, basically, reading your notes to the audience. It certainly isn’t only scientists who do this—you see it everywhere. But scientists are often guilty parties in this respect.
What’s wrong with words on the screen? Well, I have to thank my fellow communication trainer Dan Agan for explaining this to me, powerfully and lucidly.
When we teach scientists to communicate at the National Science Foundation “Science: Becoming the Messenger” workshop, Agan covers PowerPoint, and he stresses the importance of using your slides to visually enhance the talk, rather than just to put your own crib notes up for everybody to see. Dan even remarks that doing it the latter way is sort of like filming a movie by slowly scanning the camera over the script, so the viewers can read it.
Obviously nobody would do that—and nobody would want to watch such a movie. But why, then, do so many people put their notes on the screen when they use PowerPoint?
It can’t be because audiences enjoy being read to. They don’t. It is both boring and also distracting to try to read words on a screen while also listening to someone talk. It’s a walk-and-chew-gum kinda thing. It is much easier for audiences to listen to you talk and simultaneously take in images that enhance what you’re saying, than for them to listen to you talk and also read the points you are making.
So if that’s not the explanation for overly wordy slides, then what is?
Well, one explanation may simply be the “need for notes”—you haven’t memorized your talk, and so either you have to print out notes physically, or you have to have them there to look at.
Yet another possibility for slide wordiness is that scientists like to exchange their presentations with colleagues. And it feels odd to share a PowerPoint that is all images and no words—how is anyone who wasn’t there supposed to know what you said?
These are certainly excuses. They just aren’t very good ones.
Read the full piece here. There’s a lot more….
Oh, and by the way, this is the funniest picture I’ve ever seen of a bad PowerPoint slide, from the blog Garr’s posterous:
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