IF YOU GIVE A BULLET, YOU SHOULD TAKE A BULLET!

I once had a brilliant speech teacher who put it this way, "If you give a bullet, you should take a bullet!" Before this epic discussion on PowerPoint, I was taught, in the past, that when giving a presentation its ok to load up each slide with tons of facts, clip art, sound effects, graphs and bullet points; the more, the better!  However, after my teacher broke it down, I realized how ineffective and boring I was really being. I felt bad for what I put some of my fellow peers and teachers through in my past presentations. So I came to this personal conclusion:
 "MY FIVE PET PEEV'S OF POWERPOINT"

1. Bullet points
2. Ugly/Unnecessary Clip Art
3. Too Much Text for ONE Slide
4. Bizarre Sound Effects
5. Un-readable Graphs/Charts

Bullet points are a distraction and they pull away the attention of the audience from the speaker. Yes, they help organize the slide a little better, but let's be honest, when a PowerPoint is going are you really listening to the teacher or are you trying to scramble and write everything down before the timer switches slides?

Using Ugly/Unnecessary Clip Art is a crime. Most of the clip art available is ugly, weird and distracting. If someone is giving a presentation on a dog adoption business they should use real pictures of man's best friend. The real pictures will evoke a more positive emotional response to the presentation. Using a clip art dog that's purple and oddly disfigured will not make someone WANT to adopt; possibly run over..

Too Much Text for ONE Slide is a major no no! When an audience sees a slide like this, automatically the brain goes into auto pilot and distractions are easily to succumb too.. like that oddly shaped purple dog. Plus if the speaker is reading DIRECTLY off the slide, it unprofessional.

Bizarre Sound Effects are retarded. They are fun to play around with but in a presentation they are again distracting, boring and in many cases irrelevant to the presentation. Nothing worse than when someone ends a presentation with a flushing toilet sound or clapping. It's amateur.

Finally, Un-readable Graphs/Charts are the worst visual aids anyone can put in a presentation. I am all for having visual aids but they must be organized, comprehensible and depicted in an appropriate graph/chart choice. Having a poorly depicted set of information will confuse the audience, discourage/lose their attention and cripple the presentation.

PowerPoint is a very useful tool and needs to be thought out before it is made. The speaker must make the audience depend on them for all the information they are going to learn. Having the major topics on the PowerPoint will help guide the presentation but the speaker must know their material to make it all work. PowerPoint can be used in just about any situation. For instance, people who help develop athletic teams and strengthen team relationships, all geared towards winning national championships, can use PowerPoint. The women's soccer team went through one of these team building work shops yesterday and it was very effective. The speaker didn't use bullet points, clip art, huge amounts of text, bizarre sound effects or un-readable graphs/charts. She used relative material like a video clip form  The Blindside and all her PowerPoint information was simple. We had to listen to learn. I believe that if these five pet peev's are left out of PowerPoint, a speaker can give a presentation that is effective and professional. How they choose to present it is their choice.