Death to weak PowerPoint: strategies to create effective visual presentations

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THE PROBLEM WITH POWERPOINT There is nothing more frustrating than sitting through a presentation bombarded by slide after slide of small text, difficult to read graphs, irrelevant clip art images, and poorly designed templates. Often to blame is the use and abuse of PowerPoint1 (e.g., Tufte, 2003; Bumiller, 2010). Academics typically only endure weak PowerPoint presentations at conferences, while university students may be exposed to them several times a day for an entire semester. Strong PowerPoint presentations enhance student engagement and help students retain information (e.g., Susskind, 2005), while weak PowerPoint slides can lead to distraction, boredom, and impeded learning (Savoy et al., 2009). The authors of this paper became interested in improving their PowerPoint slides after observing several presentations that badly misused PowerPoint, and realizing that they made many of the same mistakes. Our slides used standard, boring templates; were text heavy, and included grainy gif images—embarrassingly, some of which were even animated. For example, Figure 1A contains a slide that was prepared for a lecture in an introductory psychology course. The slide uses a template that makes the text difficult to read, there are several lengthy bullets, and the photos are too small. To make matters worse, the instructor had the slide heavily animated—bullet points flew in, swirled around, and even made sound. Needless to say, students were not impressed.