In presos, though, a no-no
Research over the past few years has revealed that using bullet points in PowerPoint presentations is not a Good Idea. I owe a big vote of thanks to Leslie Belknap (@LeslieBelknap) and the folks whose research she has drawn on for her post “The Scientific Reason Why Bullets Are Bad for Presentations.”
Leslie, by the way, is program director and co-chair of the speakers committee of TEDxNashville. And she served as marketing director of Ethos3, a Nashville-based presentation design and training firm. So she knows whereof she speaks.
OK, the skinny is that “Bullet points make information harder to remember.” And why is that? Mostly because using lists of text (bullets) on your slides means that your audience will struggle. Folks will try to listen to you at the same time as they process that information on your slides. And they’ll end up retaining less. In an experiment where the same business strategy was presented as a list and as a graphic representation, “Subjects … paid significantly more attention to, agreed with, and better recalled the strategy than did subjects who saw a (textually identical) bulleted list version.”
The culprit here is working memory. According to research by Dr. Chris Atherton, a psychologist and user experience consultant mentioned in Leslie’s post, working memory has its limits. When you ask your audience to switch back and forth between reading your slides and listening to what you have to say, it becomes cognitively exhausted. If you minimize the amount of text on your slides and use visuals to convey complex ideas, your audience uses working memory that is separate from the linguistic and auditory processing areas—and retains more information.
What to do
- Use relevant visuals—Avoid clip art, please
- Reduce the number of words on your slides
- Present one idea per slide—which means you’re nixing bulleted lists and sparing your audience
As a writer, these ideas should probably strike fear into my heart, but they don’t. As I’ve said before, words and visuals should work together. And the fewer the words, the better they must be.
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