Don't. Read. Your. Dumb. Slides.

My response to Chris Brogan's smallest presentation hack: "Don't. Read. Your. Dumb. Slides."

Hear, hear! You should’ve heard the gasp that when through the room when, during a talk on presentation skills, I recommended against using PowerPoint and in particular, against using bullet-pointed slides.

“But how will we ever communicate??” seemed to be the murmur.

Um… how did we communicate before PowerPoint? We told stories. We told jokes. We showed powerful images. We had conversations. We laughed; we cried; it was better than Cats.

Oh, wait. Anyway, we managed to communicate before bullet points, and we’ll do it even better once we ditch them.

To clarify, I think in bullet points. When I organize my talks, they tend to be in outline form, with bullet points. Bullet points are great for clarifying your own thoughts and helping you remember what comes next. They are not great as visuals. They are terrible as visuals. The only visual you could have worse than a bullet-pointed slide would be a slide of solid, tiny, illegible text.

We can read. We didn't come here to read. Most of us came to whatever presentation you're giving to hear your ideas, process them and ask you questions. Mold those ideas for us--in the form of stories, images, case studies, charts, graphs and anecdotes. If we want to read, we'll go to your web page or read your handouts.