Oh, how I LOVE this article! For 10 years, I’ve tried to persuade my Speaking Truthfully students and clients to, if not renounce, then use PPT sparingly. I’ve begged them: learn to tell stories! Learn to enchant your audience. Use metaphors. If you are only going to give out bullet-pointed information, stay home, send everyone a PDF, or give them a URL link. Take advantage of the opportunity of being with people to create connection; use speech not just to inform, but to arouse, excite, inspire, elevate! Oh, how I LOVE this article.

How PowerPoint is killing critical thought

I still remember the best lecture I ever attended. It was part of a joint series offered by the English and philosophy departments in my first term at university and, given that the subject was Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, should have been the dullest event in Christendom that night. But it wasn’t. The lecturer, Thomas Baldwin, had a deceptively simple style: he would write a proposition on the blackboard facing us and gaze at it for a moment, like a medium beckoning a spirit. Then he would turn and smile, and start to explain. (more…)