Terminators of Patchy Oration,

After yesterday’s BBC magazine article on PowerPoint, I thought I’d write a few notes.

As a speaker, I always try to provide enough information on slides to ensure that the presentation still makes sense if I crash and burn. Presentations should be seen as an opportunity to voice opinions rather than project facts, not everyone will agree with an opinion so winning over all of the audience is an unattainable goal that should not be strived for. Of course, believing in your words and data is paramount but it’s fierce out there, some audience members have their own agendas and they’re not there to fall in love with the speaker. I don’t know how much of this I believe but telling myself this prevents me from crashing and burning.

The worst thing about listening to presentation is the ‘outline’ slide; after the title slide, the speaker lists all the things that they will proceed to talk about, they say how the talk is divided up in sections and that they will end with a conclusion. I have to hold myself back from shouting ‘Get on with it’. BBC 6Music’s Gideon Coe invented a new catchphrase last week which I found amusing: ‘Get on with it…in your own time’. Avoiding this slide in future will inject an element of surprise into the presentation and high-octane drama will ensue with each click of the mouse.