Use PowerPoint as visual aid, not to kill your presentation

If it’s been said once it’s been said a million times. PowerPoint slides don’t talk, the presenter does. PowerPoint slides don’t connect with the audience, the presenter does.

Avoiding death by PowerPoint should be a speaker’s Holy Grail. I am not about to delve into the correct usage of slides. No. Google and others do that better. What I am on about is knowing when to use them, if you must.

Slides must be used as a visual aid and not as a verbal crutch. Last Sunday I listened to a doctor talk to an audience about ulcers.

He had 15 minutes to present and had 19 slides. Save for the one slide that showed the diagram of a stomach, the content in the rest was better suited for a biology class. And the speaker didn’t bother to “speak in English” — in a language the audience could understand.

Gastrointestinal it was on the slide and gastrointestinal it remained in his speech. Personally, he “killed” me with his slides three minutes into the presentation; and so I drifted towards the audience who I realised were “dead” too, glancing at their watches and wondering when the pain would end.

Someone who had ulcers put it best after the pain ended: “I came hoping to get some relief on my ulcer but listening to him only stressed the ulcer more.”

The doctor had used PowerPoint as a verbal crutch not as a visual aid. A crutch is meant to support. One who has a fracture would lean on it to favour the broken leg. A verbal crutch is anything a speaker uses to “speak” for him.

This happens for three reasons: he/she doesn’t know how to say something; or it’s too much work speaking in plain language; or the crutch, PowerPoint in this case, is used because other people use it and surely, successful Microsoft surely must know something we don’t.

And so the vicious cycle continues. The artificial crutch grows in strength and the natural leg weakens and, if unwatched, atrophies, at which point, the speaker might as well just email the presentation.

A visual aid on the other hand is used when it’s the best (if not, the only) way to show what the speaker is saying. A science teacher who takes the students outside so that they may see what pollination is about has used a visual aid.

The doctor speaking about the bone structure is best advised to come along with a real skeleton or an image of one. I know of a CEO of a multinational manufacturing concern who threw out his marketing team after they went to dazzle him with slides of the proposed new packaging – “go bring me a prototype!”, he ordered. “I want to feel what the customer will”.

There’s a head of department who shared the story of how his CEO stopped him before starting a presentation of slides, with an assertion: “I can read. What I want to hear is your version”.

Which reminded me of how so many interviewees stumble at the question, “tell us about yourself”. Most start verbalising what is already on their CV, in effect using the document as a verbal crutch.

Tell me, how would you have reacted if the doctor hadn’t come with the slides but instead, had started off by equating an ulcer to an open wound in the stomach exposed to the acids that digest food.

He would then have explained the burning sensation to a million times that which applying spirit inflames a wound. Would you have drifted? I doubt it. I know I wouldn’t.

Kageche is the lead facilitator Lend Me Your Ears, a sales and speaker-training firm. Email: [email protected]