Powerpointless

An anti-powerpoint article of interest to preachers can be found in The Times (2) today. See here.

These are the most interesting paragraphs.

...The research, from the University of New South Wales, suggests that we process information best in verbal or written form, but not in both simultaneously. As so often, it has taken the best efforts of brainy academics to prove what most of us instinctively knew. Trying to follow what someone is saying while watching the same words on a screen is the equivalent of riding a bicycle along a crowded train. It offers the appearance of making extra progress but is actually rather impractical. ...

... If you do want to win an audience to your point of view, whatever it is you’re selling, then there is no effective alternative to the traditional art of speechmaking. Rhetoric, as it used to be known, has acquired a dodgy reputation over the years. Platform speeches have become equated, thanks to the efforts of hack politicians like me, with pompous and stilted cliché-mongering. You know the sort of stuff — references to things being “beyond peradventure” and initiatives being “rolled out through multi-agency working”. But it is still the case that a single speech can move, excite, motivate and change minds in a way that no other form of communication can accomplish. ...

... Why is it that old-fashioned rhetoric is so much more effective than 21st-century slide-shows? It’s partly because pictures created by words are so much more memorable and moving than words appearing on a screen designed for pictures. And it’s also because classical rhetoric has developed, over generations, to fit arguments to the contours of the human mind. Classical orators have learnt how to shape their thoughts to rest pleasingly in our ears. The use of lists of three, the deployment of humour, image and metaphor, the way in which the tone of voice is varied, are all techniques every bit as sophisticated as any Microsoft program, and much more user-friendly.
A single speech, in isolation, whether it’s the Gettysburg Address or a party conference oration, is one of the most persuasive tools devised by man. But there is one that is even more finely honed. And that’s the debating speech — the reply to a conversation in which the claims of your competitors are examined, and shredded, with logic and humour. ...