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The Case Against Slides
I’ve been blogging for over a decade. Almost that entire time, I’ve been waging a campaign against slides.
I’m losing. A realist might say that I’ve lost — and in fact, lost some time ago. But I’m an optimist, for some reason, so I’m still fighting the good fight.
Why am I so determined to stamp out slideware as it’s typically used by speakers almost everywhere almost all the time? Because of lots of neuroscience that shows that we humans can’t multitask. At all. What we do is switch between one thing and another, and when we do, we manage the switching inefficiently. We lose the tail end of what we’re switching from and the beginning of what we’re switching to. So every time you ask me, as an audience member, to look at a slide, we stop listening to you talk for a moment, switch into visual mode, and lose a bit of what you’re saying. Then, when we’re done staring enthusiastically at your magnificent visual creation and turn our attention back to you, we lose your first few words.
Switching costs. So why do you ask your audiences to do it? Because you were convinced a long time ago by a bogus study and a cliché. Microsoft did a study of slideware that — astonishingly — found that it aided comprehension. Don’t believe it. And ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ Only sometimes.
