Verdict after four weeks on Twitter

I didn’t join Twitter lightly, as I wasn’t at all convinced that it would be worth the time and effort. But if I didn’t have a go, I’d never know.

So what, after the first four weeks Tweeting and reading Tweets, is the verdict so far?

Pros:

  1. I’ve come across some useful links to interesting people, blogs and websites that I’d probably never have heard about without Twitter.
  1. Some links to blog posts, websites, etc. do turn out to be well worth reading.
  1. Announcing new blog posts of my own on Twitter increases the number of visitors to this blog.
  1. A side effect of (3) is that there’s also been an increase in the number of other blogs that are now including links to this one.
  1. Since joining, there’s been some improvement in the ranking of my books on the Amazon bestsellers lists.
  1. I find Tweets useful for occasional short rants or questions that aren’t worth a longer post here.

Cons:

  1. I find the stream of consciousness stuff extremely irritating and self-indulgent – i.e. I’m baffled as to why so many people think that anyone else (and especially total strangers like me) could possibly be interested in mundane personal waffle about their daily lives, such as going jogging, what they had for breakfast/lunch/dinner and/or whether they’ve taken their children/grandchildren to the seaside or bought them an ice cream while they were there.
  1. Nor do I understand why so many quotations and management platitudes get posted on Twitter - when there are plenty of other sources, both on websites and in books (remember them?).

But, as the Pros so clearly outnumber the Cons, I’ll be carrying on with it for a while longer.

The 'detective story' principle and puzzle-solution formats

The last two posts have featured comments on using slides and visual aids by the late Sir Lawrence Bragg.

But he also had a good understanding of the effectiveness of story-telling and leading audiences to the solution of a puzzle in presentations:

'There is a most important principle which I think of as the 'detective story' principle. It is a matter of order. How dull a detective story would be if the writer told you who did it in the first chapter and then gave you the clues.

'Yet how many lectures do exactly this. One wishes to give the audience the aesthetic pleasure of seeing how puzzling phenomena become crystal clear when one has the clue and thinks about them in the right way. So make sure the audience is first puzzled.

'A friend of mine, a barrister, told me, that, when presenting a case to a judge, if he could appear to be fumbling toward a solution and could entice the judge to say "But, Mr. X, isn't the point you are trying to make this or that?" he had as good as won the case.

'One wants to get the audience into this frame of mind, when they are coaxed to guess for themselves what the answer is. Again I fear I am saying the trite and obvious, but I can assure you I have often sat and groaned at hearing a lecturer murder the most exciting story just by putting things in the wrong order.'

(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).

Although Bragg was dealing here with the overall structure of a lecture or presentation, much shorter puzzle-solution formats are also one of the main rhetorical techniques discussed and recommended in my books, and I posted some video clips of them triggering applause HERE.

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),

PowerPoint and the demise of Chalk & Talk: (3) Glimmers of hope


Welcome to anyone who's arrived here, directly or indirectly, via the link on yesterday's BBC website - in which case you must have an interest in speaking and presentation. If so, that's what this blog is mostly about, and you can see a list of (and link to) everything that's been posted here since Gordon Brown's party conference speech last year by clicking HERE.

As this is the third in a series of three posts marking 25 years of PowerPoint, you might like to look first at the previous ones on 'The beginning of the end' and 'The lost art'. And, if you haven't already seen it, you might also like see the short piece on yesterday's
BBC website, where there's also an interesting, if worrying, slide show about PPt.


As it’s probably too late for a cultural counter-revolution that would take us back to the good old days when chalk and talk ruled supreme, the best we can hope for is that salvation may be at hand in three glimmers of hope built into presentational software like PowerPoint.

1. Dynamic and animated functions
The first is that the dynamic and animated functions make it fairly easy to simulate some of the benefits of chalk and talk by enabling you to put things up as you talk about them – whether by building points up step-by-step, or by creating diagrams that appear to draw themselves on the screen.

2. Pictorial and graphical functions
Another glimmer of hope is that PowerPoint has tremendous pictorial and graphical capabilities that make it easy for speakers to make the most of the fact that audiences find genuinely visual slides, such as pictures, simple graphs, etc., much more helpful than ones made up of nothing but words and numbers.

3. Blank slides
Finally, you can bring considerable relief to your audiences by switching everything off for a while – either by pressing the relevant button on the keyboard or by inserting slides consisting of nothing but a black background, both of which make it look as though there’s nothing on the screen at all.

This is, in effect, the electronic equivalent of turning over to a blank page on a flip chart or rubbing chalk off a blackboard, and forces listeners to focus on nothing else but you and what you are saying – at least until the appearance of the next slide.

BUT:
Unfortunately, only a tiny minority presenters are making any use of any of these options. The vast majority of slides I see still consist of seemingly endless lists of bullet points, and the full potential of PowerPoint is still a long way from being realised.


The 1960s argument about blackboards versus whiteboards may be a thing of the past, but it is surely time for an urgent debate about the relative merits of using slides, chalk and talk and other types of visual aid.

Otherwise, the danger is that the real cost of the new orthodoxy will not be the millions spent on computers, software and projectors, nor the enormous waste of time and money resulting from people attending presentations from which they get little or no benefit – which, for the UK, I’ve estimated at more than £7.8 billion a year.

The real price and the real tragedy will be the incalculable long-term damage that will come from continuing to believe that PowerPoint is a foolproof panacea for presenters, when it's no more than a tool. And, like any tool, its effectiveness depends on its users understanding its limitations, as well as its strengths.

(Although this is more or less where I'd originally planned to end this series, the interest stimulated by the BBC website means that there could well be a few more related posts in the not too distant future).


PREVIOUS POSTS ON POWERPOINT INCLUDE:
PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4
BBC Television News slideshow quiz
How NOT to use PowerPoint
If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides
An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation
PowerPoint presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
Slidomania contaminates another BBC channel
There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint – until there’s an audience
BBC Television News: produced by of for morons?
PowerPoint comes to church