Life After PowerPoint!

George Torok, an executive speech coach out of Ontario, has a great post on “Speaking Without Notes.” (His blog is always worth reading.)

He gives three suggestions for eliminating or cutting down on the notes you rely on while speaking:

1. Key Word Notes: After you’ve outlined your speech and rehearsed it, distill it down to a few — no more than six or seven — key words or short phrases. Write out the words on a single piece of paper (just one side) or on a note card.
2. Questions: Create your speech as if you’re answering a succession of questions. Imagine the audience asking the first question, which you’re then happy to answer. Your answer naturally leads them to ask another question, which you answer. And so on. (I love this technique.)
3. Props: Use a prop for each main point. The prop is your cue. As you pick it up or demonstrate it, you’ll remember what you want to say.

Here’s an example from a Toastmasters speech contest, which I found on Ian Griffin’s blog, of a great use of a prop:

I’ve been rereading Marshall McLuhan lately. Always challenging. Always a delight.

Media, according to McLuhan, is an extension — any technology a person or society uses to expand the range of the human body or mind in a new way. Telegraph, radio, movies, TV, the Internet, e-mail, and IM are all extensions, because they are — or were at one time — new technologies that expand how we communicate.

Extensions bring about amputations — technologies that are lost because of the adoption of a newer technology. The telegraph, for example, is an amputation caused by the telephone.

McLuhan noted — and was concerned by the fact — that most people are excited about extensions while ignoring amputations. We are, in simpler terms, excited about what we gain by a new technology, a new medium, without giving much thought to what we lose.

PowerPoint is a case in point.

It is clearly an extension, a new technology for presenting information. It makes many things possible: the relatively easy creation, display, and dissemination of visual elements (words, graphs, charts, diagrams, etc.).

It also creates amputations — lost technologies, lost media, lost ways of communicating. Presenters almost never use a chalkboard or (thankfully) an overhead projector any more. Few people (sadly) use flip charts. Almost no one creates handouts. (I don’t consider a printed version of your PowerPoint presentation a handout.) And fewer and fewer people (tragically) are writing research papers or white papers.

We are, I think, quick to celebrate the benefits of PowerPoint and slow to acknowledge the losses. What do you think?

Photo courtesy of Medipedia.

Jon Steward of The Daily Show expands here on the NYT article I referenced in last week’s posting. He embellishes on the article in his own inimical fashion and then extends it to speeches from the movies Patton, Star Wars, and Braveheart. Check it out.