Public speaking expert Max Atkinson wages his vigorous war against PowerPoint in general and especially when used on BBC TV news programmes.

Here, for example, he describes how he presented some unsuspecting diners with a clip from a BBC News programme and then asked them how much they remembered:

It came as something of a surprise, even to me, that none of the 40 or so participants was able to answer all 5 questions correctly.

 

Only three of them (7.5%) managed to answer 4/5 correctly – so it didn’t take long for the tie-breaker questions to produce a winner.

 

I wouldn’t want to give too much weight to a research design that was intended partly as entertainment and partly to illustrate one of the themes of my talk. But I do think it’s interesting that 92.5% of an audience of highly educated professionals – with far more experience of watching PowerPoint presentations than most ordinary viewers of BBC Television News programmes – were only able to remember three (or fewer than three) of the main points in Peston’s report/presentation.

 

What if anything does this show?

 

Mainly nothing. Or at least that Max should not have been surprised.

 

How many times have we all listened to the weather forecast on the radio and at the end of a minute or so’s weather blather wondered “But is it going to rain tomorrow or not?”.

 

The fact is that most people absorb spoken information of any sort very badly. Here is what my own PowerPoint slides have to say on the matter:

 

       Speaking for impact

 

·         You speak at a conference or official event

·         You talk quite well for ten minutes

·         A good outcome?

 

 

If you are lucky

 

·         In one hour’s time they’ll remember two points

·         Tomorrow they’ll remember one point

·         In four weeks they may remember you spoke

 

 

If you are really lucky

 

·         In four months’ (or four years) time they won’t remember that you spoke

·         But they’ll quote a new idea you lodged in their minds

 

 

Brilliant outcome for your speech

 

·         Someone senior meets Minister at dinner

·         That Ambassador’s speech today was great – I’d never realised THAT before

 

That is the skill of public speaking. Not to transfer information but to convey insight, and to create appreciation of the speaker’s own commitment and energy.

 

A lot of PowerPoint presentations are indeed clueless, because the people giving them are dull. They overload the presentation with information and present it badly – too many words and flow-charts, not enough pictures. (People like pictures). Too much knowledge – not enough wisdom.

 

All this boils down to a simple question: what is the speaker trying to achieve? Any speaker at a seminar or conference or going on TV should ask herself/himself this:

 

What two or three simply expressed new things do I want these people in the audience to know or think in a week’s time? How best to convey that – and make it stick?

 

So that long after the speaking occasion itself has been forgotten, someone who was there will say:

 

“I heard someone speaking once – can’t remember where or when – but the speaker said something that I’ll never forget…”

 

PowerPoint can help do that. So can many other public speaking tricks of the trade.

 

But a rubbish speaker should not expect cleverly presented slides and other visual cues to turn rubbish into memorable gold, or complicated facts into manageable new insight. On the BBC News or anywhere else.