Thursday, September 10, 2015

Tabula Rosa Systems Must Read Post - The Scientific Reason Why Bullets Are Bad for Presentations



When I came across this article, I was almost stunned. I have been using bullet points most of my adult life for any type of document, including email. Although, thie article below does not convince me completely, I will forever think about using bullets.You the reader can decide for yourselves.
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The Scientific Reason Why Bullets Are Bad for Presentations
By Leslie Belknap on August 31, 2015  blog.slideshare.net
You’ve probably heard this advice before: Don’t use bullet points in your presentations. But do you know why presentation design experts are so adamantly opposed to the bullet point format?
Here’s the simple, but perhaps surprising, explanation to why bullet points are bad for presentations: Bullet points make information more difficult to remember, especially when the bullet point lists are accompanied with auditory information. This is not a conjecture; it is backed by credible research.
The Value of Visualizations
In 2014, the International Journal of Business Communication published the results from The Use of Visualization in the Communication of Business Strategies, a study designed to gather empirical evidence regarding whether the use of visualization is superior to text in the communication of business strategies. The results of that experiment confirmed that lists of text are ineffective for presentations. Slides with visuals are undeniably more effective than slides with text.
Specifically, the study concluded:
Subjects who were exposed to a graphic representation of the strategy paid significantly more attention to, agreed more with, and better recalled the strategy than did subjects who saw a (textually identical) bulleted list version.
In other words, when your slides are comprised of lists of text, your audience will struggle to pay attention to your slides, they will find it difficult to agree with your message, and they will retain a less-than-ideal amount of the information.
The Limits of Working Memory
Digging deeper into the reason bullet points are bad, Dr. Chris Atherton, an award-winning lecturer in psychology and a user experience consultant for organizations such as Skype and the BBC, discovered that the limits of working memory are to blame for the failure of bullet points.
In this 2011 speech, Dr. Atherton details the results of her research:
At the beginning of her lesson, Dr. Atherton explains that when you accompany a lecture with bullet point slides, your audience will switch between reading and listening. This type of task switching is cognitively exhausting.
When presenters minimize the cognitive exertion required to absorb the information by avoiding long lists of text on their slides, audience members are able to use their remaining cognitive capabilities to actually process the information being presented. By actively processing the information instead of attempting to simultaneously read the slides as well as listen to the presenter, audience members are more likely to retain the meaning of the presentation.














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For a great email parody, view the following link:
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw&__scoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618



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