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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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