Showing what you mean: more from Professor Sir Lawrence Bragg

The previous post featured a comparison between the use of slides and drawing on a board by the late Professor Sir Lawrence Bragg, who continued the Royal Society's Christmas lectures for children that Michael Faraday (left) had started in the nineteenth century. Here's a related gem from Bragg'*:

'To the layman the difference between the description of an experiment and the actual witnessing of it is as great as the difference between looking at a foreign country on the map and visiting it; we grasp its geography in a far more vivid way when we have been to the place.

'One is struck again and again by the immense superiority, as judged by the effect on the audience, of a series of experiments and demonstrations explained by a talk over a lecture illustrated by slides. The Christmas Lectures to young people at the Royal Institution afford a good instance.

'It is surprising how often people in all walks of life own that their interest in science was first aroused by attending one of these courses when they were young, and in recalling their impressions they almost invariably say not 'we were told' but ‘we were shown’ this or that’ (Bragg’s own emphasis).

(*Advice to Lecturers: An anthology taken from the writings of Michael Faraday & Lawrence Bragg, London: The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1974, ISBN 07201 04467).

A Nobel prize winner’s view on slides versus ‘chalk and talk’

One of the best things I’ve ever read on presenting complicated technical material to audiences is an anthology published by the Royal Institution that was taken from the writings of Michael Faraday (19th century pioneer of magnetism and electricity) and Lawrence Bragg (20th century Nobel prize winner).

Both of them were famous for their ability to take audiences, whether lay or professional, to the frontiers of science.

Writing decades before the invention of PowerPoint, Bragg had this to say about slides and ‘chalk and talk’ (which isn't a million miles away from some of the points in my last three posts on the subject):


'Lecturers love slides, and in a game of associations the word 'lecture' would almost always evoke the reply 'slide'. But I think we ought to apply to slides the same test, 'What will the audience remember?'

'Some information can only be conveyed as slides, photographs, or records of actual events, such as the movement of a recording instrument, for instance, a seismograph. But slides of graphs or tables of figures are in general out of place in a lecture, or, at any rate, should be used most sparingly, just because the audience has not time to absorb them.

'If the lecturer wishes to illustrate a point with a graph, it is much better to draw it, or perhaps clamp the component parts on a magnetic board or employ some device of that kind.

'I remember well the first time I was impressed by this latter device, during a lecture on airflow through turbine blades. The lecturer altered the angle of incidence and the air arrows by shifting the parts on the board.

'It is again a question of tempo – the audience can follow at about the rate one can draw (my emphasis); one is forced to be simple, and the slight expertise of the drawing holds attention. One must constantly think of what will be retained in the audience’s memory, not of what can be crammed into the lecture.'

(From Advice to Lecturers: An anthology taken from the writings of Michael Faraday & Lawrence Bragg, London: The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1974, ISBN 07201 04467),

BBC Television News slideshow Quiz

Regular readers will know that I’m getting increasingly worried about the way BBC Television News shows us more and more PowerPoint style presentations.

Whether or not anyone at the BBC has ever bothered to ask viewers what they really think about it, I do not know, but I can’t think of any reason why television audiences would differ much from other audiences – which raises the question of why would they be any more favourably inclined towards slidomania than the hundreds of audience members who’ve told me how much they detest it when listening to PowerPoint dependent presentations.

However, after a lifetime in research, one thing I know for sure is that I might be wrong. Maybe information overload isn’t as big a problem for people as I think it is. Maybe viewers really do like to see pictures and printed words popping up on the screen behind reporters in the studio. Maybe it really does make it easier for people to understand and take in things in.

Here's another exhibit from the BBC’s 10 o’clock news (a couple of nights ago) and an invitation to see how it works for you. Watch it once – which is, of course, all that viewers get to do – and don’t read any further until you’ve seen the whole thing.

Then have a go at answering the questions below the video – and let us know how many you got right.

If the result is 'all' or 'most of them', the BBC's nightly slideshows must be doing a good job.

If it's 'none' or 'hardly any of them', I rest my case.

1. What are the 4 essentials of modern life?

2. What did the Prime Minister say today?

3. What would be hugely expensive?

4. How many of us are already in reach of superfast broadband?

5. What will be hugely expensive?

6. How much a year would the annual levy be?

7. What prices have been falling in recent years?

8. What is the government's clever wheeze?

9. How much a year is raised from television license fee payers?

10. How much is it going to cost to help old people to cope with the digital switch over?

11. How much of that might be left over by 2012?

12. How much do local news programmes cost ITV?

BBC Television News informs, educates and entertains without slides!

In case you missed the last edition of Have I Got News for You, here’s the sequence showing how much more interesting the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson can be when he forsakes the awful slides he usually inflicts on us:

You might also like to compare this with some of the following:

BBC Television News: produced for or by morons?

PowerPoint style presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)

Another BBC television slideshow

Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel

Budget speech boredom and television news tedium

It’s now thirty years since I first started recording political speeches during the 1979 general election – but I still don’t have a single budget speech in my collection.

They tend to be so long, boring and full of statistical detail and exaggerated claims about the wonderful things in store for us that there’s seldom much of interest to a speech anorak like me.

I did once manage to listen to the whole of a Gordon Brown budget speech, but the only reason I didn’t turn it off was that I was redecorating a room and didn’t want to mess up the radio with emulsion paint.

But we now have to suffer something that’s no less tedious than the budget speech itself, namely the way television news programmes report it to us.

If there’s one thing we can be sure of today, it is that scores of television news techies will have spent countless hours cooking up yet more awful slideshows to enable the likes of Messrs. Peston, Pym and Robinson to confuse us even more about what the Chancellor’s proposals really mean.

Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel

It’s not just BBC televison news programmes that are being infected by PowerPoint-style presentations from newsreaders and reporters (see blog entries on 23 October & 26 October, 2008).

Tonight’s BBC Parliament Channel featured an interview with Gerald Scarfe, arguably the finest cartoonist of his generation, about his new book – a chance, you might think, to show us a few nice pictorial examples of his talent – but why do that when it also gives you a chance to film him in front of some completely pointless and extremely distracting graphics?

Fascinating though it would have been to see the sketches of Sarah Palin he mentions, the slidomaniacs in charge of the programme seem to think that a conversation with Scarfe is so boring (which it isn’t) that we must be supplied with some brightly coloured swirling graphics to keep us awake.