Language Value
November 2018, Volume 10, Number 1 pp. 29-44
ISSN 1989-7103
PowerPoint presentations in the classroom: Re-evaluating the
genre
Larissa D’Angelo
Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures
University of Bergamo, Italy
ABSTRACT
Since the late
1990s, Microsoft PowerPoint has become the expected presentation genre. However,
several studies have demonstrated its many faults, such as the pre-formatted construction of discourse
leading to the abuse of bullet point presentations, the limited format and size of slides that support
minimum content and the ever-present risk of overwhelming viewers with too much text or data (Alley
2003, 2004, Robertshaw 2004, Gottlieb 1985, Keller 2003, Tufte 2003). Taking into consideration how
the linguistic and visual elements, as well as the design and text organizations found in PowerPoint
presentations have evolved in the last 20 years, the present paper analyses the negative effects that the
default slide structure provided by Microsoft PPT, consisting of topic-subtopics and bullet points, has on
the audience. The paper will then demonstrate the positive learning effects that the assertion evidence
structure has on readers. The different retaining degree of three groups of undergraduate students are
tested, after having exposed them to PPTs applying phrase headlines, phrase headlines and images or the
assertion evidence structure.
Keywords: PPT, PowerPoint, PowerPoint presentation, multimodality, multimodal genre, multimedia
design
I. INTRODUCTION
In today’s academic world, PowerPoint presentations have become increasingly
common not only in the hard sciences but also in the humanities, showing how the
fast-paced, visually attractive data-driven presentations typical of marketing and
business have invaded even the most traditional settings. As Tufte (2009) confirms,
“slideware - computer programs for presentations - is everywhere: in business settings,
in government bureaucracies, even in our schools and universities, where several
hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are generating trillions of slides each
year.” Indeed, if the conventional method of presenting research results at conferences,
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Larissa D’Angelo
workshops and even university lessons was to stand in front of an audience reading a
paper, scribbling on lucid or writing formulas on a blackboard, today lectures have been
enriched with images, colour and sometimes even music and videos thanks to new,
enhanced software. As Myers (2003: 3) recognises,
[…] anyone who walks around a university campus today will soon be aware that academic discourse is
not just about words. There are colour-illustrated textbooks, videos, and interactive whiteboards
boards in teaching sciences, materials and actions in labs, lectures and demonstrations,
PowerPoint presentations in university lectures, web pages as support for teaching and publicity,
and music signalling the scientific in television documentaries.
PowerPoint as a multimedia tool is used not within University walls but also by primary
school teachers teaching K-12 grades (Martin and Carr, 2015). The software is the most
utilized tool and is used daily to introduce new topics, explain concepts and presumably
enhance lessons by integrating multimodal exercises (2015: 10-11). Among a number of
multimedia software available, enabling them to create multimodal material for K-12
students, teachers still choose first and foremost PowerPoint, followed by Vimeo,
Youtube, Camtasia, Animoto, Prezi and xtranormal (2015: 8). Why has this surplus of
multimodal instruments invaded the academic world so strongly in the past few years?
As Myers (2003: 3) states, science has always been multi-modal; historians have shown
that it is our own textual bias that cuts out the elements of the visual and the performed
from past scientific practice (Gross et al. 2002). But it could be that new technologies
make it easier to carry non-verbal elements from medium to medium, and easier to
interweave different modes.
The effects of technology on academic discourse are numerous and sometimes
insidious, changing what were once ‘traditional genres’ such as the research article and
the lecture into multimodal genres, requiring new preparation and delivery skills and a
new approach to genre analysis. Myers (2000: 184) offers a particularly rich and
illuminating discussion of the intersection of technology and genre in which he
discusses the effects of PowerPoint on his own lecture preparation, delivery, and
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Power Point Presentations In The Classroom: Re-Evaluating The Genre
reception. After dealing with the more obvious consequences, such as the ‘bulletization’
of information, he goes on to write:
[…] the written text, produced by the machine, has become the star; I am reduced to an unseen voiceover
of my own lectures. That may not matter in a business setting, where different people from sales
or personnel may be called upon to speak the same words. But for a university lecturer, it marks
a shift in what Goffman (1981) called footing; that is, I am seen as the animator rather than the
source of the utterance. Instead of my speaking with the aid of some visual device, the text is
speaking with my aid.
Swales (2004: 7) reinforces Myers’ account of technological impact by stating that
certain multimodal genres, such as the PowerPoint, inevitably blur the boundaries
between the academic and the commercial, and between the written and the visual.
Along the same lines, Rowley-Jolivet
(2001) observes that the frequent use of
photographs in Conference Presentations (hereinafter CP) reinforces the sense that these
presentations often deal with early-stage, breaking-news research. Given the CP time
pressures, the idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words” has clearly come to the
fore (Swales 2004: 199). For this reason, visual presentation and graphics in conference
PowerPoint presentations and handouts have become vital to outline a piece of work in
a form that is easily assimilated and stimulates interest and discussion (Matthews 1990,
Tufte 1990).
How has the genre of oral presentations evolved through the years and how is it that
PowerPoint invaded university classrooms and conference venues? More importantly,
how does PowerPoint’s traditional format modify academic discourse? Long before
today's presentation programs, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, OpenOffice.org, Impress
or Apple iWork Keynote, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military
used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. However, the format has become
omnipresent as PowerPoint, which was created in 1984 and later acquired by Microsoft,
spread around the world. This spoken/written genre has evolved together with
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technology and its popularity has raised several debates concerning its common practice
use at conferences (Keller 2004, Parker 2001, Schwartz 2003).
Visual aids and computer presentations can enhance speaker credibility and persuasion,
increase audience interest, focus audience attention, and aid retention of key
points/content, although the exact opposite is also true when visual aids and computer
presentations are used poorly by a speaker (Stoner 2009). In fact, presentation programs
may help speakers organize their talks, but what is convenient for the speaker might be
detrimental to both content and audience. The typical PowerPoint style suggested by the
program itself and the ready-made templates available to Microsoft users routinely
disrupt, dominate, and trivialize content, elevating format over content and betraying an
attitude of commercialism (Tufte 2009).
Since the 1980s, Gottlieb (1984) and others (Alley 2003, Atkinson 2005, Doumont
2005, Gaudelli et al. 2009, Keedy 1982) have rejected phrase headlines, responsible for
unclear main assertions and lack of connections in the evidence, and have advocated the
assertion-evidence structure, which features a sentence-assertion headline supported by
visual evidence (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. PPT slide employing the assertion-evidence structure.
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How does the assertion-evidence structure work? When a presentation slide appears
before the audience, the audience immediately turns to it and tries to decipher its
contents and purpose. The assertion-evidence structure helps the audience quickly
understand and retain the contents of a slide by providing a sentence headline, which
orients the audience to the purpose of the slide; the audience can then turn its attention
back to the presenter. Once the presenter has made clear what the main message of the
slide is, the presenter should support that assertion primarily with images and with
words where needed. The reasoning for this guideline is that images, if well-conceived,
can communicate information much more quickly to the audience than blocks of text
can.
Using a sentence headline is not the norm in scientific presentations
(Alley and
Robertshaw 2004). In fact, because thousands of presentations typically use phrase
headlines (or no headlines at all), the assertion-evidence structure goes against what is
most often seen and recommended. Phrase headlines in presentation slides in fact,
should be avoided because they seem to reduce the personal connections between the
presenter and audience, thus disturbing the flow of information and reducing the
persuasive force of the message.
Because presentation slides reduce the personal connections between the presenter and
audience, presenters have to be critical thinkers about the reader-oriented strategies
employed and, most of all, when this academic genre is appropriate and when it is not
(Alley 2003).
Taking into consideration how the linguistic and visual elements, as well as the design
and text organizations found in PowerPoint presentations have evolved in the last 20
years, the present paper analyses the negative effects that the default slide structure
provided by Microsoft PPT, consisting of topic-subtopics and bullet points, has on the
audience. On the other hand, the paper will demonstrate the positive learning effects
that the assertion evidence structure has on readers. More specifically, the different
retaining degree of three groups of undergraduate students will be tested, after having
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exposed them to PPTs applying phrase headlines, phrase headlines and images or the
assertion evidence structure.
II. METHODOLOGY
Two main methods for presenting data will be taken into consideration and analysed
hereafter: on the one hand the standard method for presenting information through the
projection of data in bullet-style and/or graphical formats i.e. phrase headlines, on the
other hand the assertion-evidence structure, which is gradually gaining acceptance in the
hard sciences.
To ascertain the positive or negative effects of these two different types of PPT formats
on the audience and on the university student population in particular, three groups of
undergraduate students attending the University of Bergamo between October 2015 and
December 2017 have been selected and exposed to the same subject matter, which was
however presented in different forms
(see Table 1). The first group, counting 58
students, served as the control group and was exposed to a 30-hour module, entitled
‘The language of written advertisements in English’, which took place in the first
semester of the academic year 2015/16 and was addressed to first year students enrolled
in the Intercultural Communication for Co-operation and Business undergraduate
degree programme. The control group was exposed to lessons utilizing PPT
presentations, which employed “bullet style” phrases, interspersed with graphs and
chunks of text. The second group counted
45 students enrolled in the same
undergraduate degree programme and exposed to the same 30-hour module, which took
place the following academic year, although in this case, relevant illustrations were
added to text-only presentation materials. The third group counted 62 students, enrolled
in the same degree programme as the previous two groups of students and attending the
same course, although the 30-hour module took place, in this case, in the first semester
of the academic year 2017/18. The latter batch of students was exposed to carefully
re-designed slides organized according to the assertion-evidence structure (Figure 1).
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Power Point Presentations In The Classroom: Re-Evaluating The Genre
Table 1. Tests conducted and group characteristics
Group
Semester
Academic
Number
Number
Material used
Year
of
of course
students
hours
1
1st
2015/2016
58
30
Topic-subtopic slide design, “bullet style”
phrases with graphs and chunks of text
2
2nd
2016/2017
45
30
Topic-subtopic slide design, “bullet style”
phrases with graphs, chunks of text and
illustrations
3
1st
2017/2018
62
30
PPT
slides
following
the
assertion-evidence structure
All the students selected for the research had an attendance rate of at least 90%, had all
studied English for at least five years before the beginning of the course, and reached a
certified B1 level of English. All students were administered the same multiple-choice
test on the last day of the course and were given 30 minutes to complete the task.
Students were administered the test without notice so as to measure the retention of the
material to which they had been exposed over the previous
3 months, without
preparation.
The test featured 20 questions focusing on the content of the course and 5 different
answers were provided for each question. The results obtained by the second and third
group were compared with the results obtained by the control group and the relevant
statistics were drawn, demonstrating the positive effects of adding relevant images to
PPT slides and using the assertion-evidence structure.
III. RESULTS
The investigation described in this section relies heavily on the generative theory of
multimedia design (Mayer 2001). This theory is based on the view of learning as
knowledge construction, the idea that learner’s actively build mental representations
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based on what is presented and what they already know. It therefore advocates that
materials that facilitate selection, organization, and integration of to-be-learned
information are of benefit in designed instruction.
The following hypotheses have been tested on three groups of non-native undergraduate
students, following a 30-hour module in English:
1. By simply adding relevant illustrations to text-only presentation materials,
retention increases;
2. People comprehend and retain better without extraneous information (learning
material must be simplified, removing everything that isn’t directly related to the
discussion).
As Table 2 shows, the first group of students, which served as the control group for the
research, scored an average of 68% on the final test. These students were exposed to
learning material which consisted mainly in PPT slides employing “bullet style”
phrases, interspersed with graphs and chunks of text. A limited number of images were
shown in PPT slides and numerous references were instead made to the textbook
adopted for the course.
Table 2. Retention increase with different PPT layouts
Group
Material provided
Average score on
Retention
test (%)
increase (%)
1 (control group)
Mainly text-only PPT slides
68%
-
2
PPT slides with text and images
87%
+19%
3
PPT slides displaying the
94%
+26%
assertion-evidence structure.
The second group of students was exposed to the same PPT slides, to which relevant
images were added. Unlike the learning material provided to the previous group, in this
case, almost every slide included at least one picture relevant to the subject matter. At
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the end of the course these students scored 87% on the test given, demonstrating that
just by adding relevant illustrations to text-only presentations, retention increased by
19%.
The third group of students were exposed to carefully re-designed PPT slides,
employing the assertion evidence structure. Learning material was simplified, removing
everything that was not directly related to the discussion and a sentence headline was
used, followed by a clear picture or simplified graph, reinforcing and/or complementing
the information given in the headline. Sentence headlines were no longer than two lines
so as to avoid heavy chunks of text and the total number of slides provided was less
numerous, so that in certain instances information was conveyed only orally and relied
on the rhetorical capabilities of the presenter. The students belonging to this group
scored an average of
94% on the final test, showing that the use of the
assertion-evidence structure increased retention by 26%.
This last finding provides a powerful incentive not only to re-design and re-think the
layout of university course materials, but also to implement the assertion-evidence
principle whenever a transfer of knowledge is required as in academic meetings,
conferences and workshops. It is also a strong incentive to avoid including graphics or
multimedia effects simply for the sake of including them and to incorporate only the
graphics that closely relate to the content, removing all extraneous, distracting details
(Sommers 2008).
IV. DISCUSSING THE ASSERTION-EVIDENCE STRUCTURE: SWIMMING
AGAINST THE CURRENT
As introduced in the previous sections, since the late 1990s, Microsoft PowerPoint has
become the expected presentation genre, because it is the most commonly pre-installed
software in PCs and Macs alike. The software developed from a culture of slides within
business, government, and military organizations, with the latter particularly fond of
bullet phrases in documentation, long before the introduction of electronic
presentations. In particular, PowerPoint was introduced when the form of
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communication began requiring interaction in different forms both horizontally and
vertically within an organization (Pece 2005).
In corporate history, DuPont has been one of the first users of charts and graphs to be
viewed in a special chart-viewing room. This practice was widely copied and what was
“uniquely DuPont” (Orlikowski and Yates 1994) - use of graphs as visual aids -
became more widespread. By the second half of the 20th century, visual aids became
the norm and the pre-processed ‘bullet style’ presentation of information became the
standard rhetorical construction employed in academic and non-academic settings.
The shift from carefully crafted lucid presentations and expensive 35 mm slides to
ready-to-use and widely accessible PPT slides has revolutionized and standardised
rhetoric, deconstructing the art of oratory within University walls (Keller 2004, Parker
2001, Myers 2000, Tufte 2003). Its design forces users to follow a pre-formatted
construction of discourse, encouraging an abuse of bullet point presentations; the format
and size of slides do not support much content and tables as well as graphs, if presented
through a PPT slide, hold very little information and the risk of overwhelming viewers
with too much text or data is ever-present (Alley and Robertshaw 2004, Keller 2003,
Tufte 2003). If these negative aspects were not enough, Tufte (2003) has correctly
underlined that the biggest fault of the software is its tendency to “dilute thought”
(2003:6), encouraging a “generic, superficial, simplistic thinking” (2003: 5). Although it
simplifies the presenter’s task of delivering oral discourse because of its bullet point
style, its design limits and slows down the flow of information; simply reinforcing what
is being said, thus rendering this tool inadequate to for complex, non-linear issues.
Another fault lies in the quick loss of audience attention because listeners are led to shift
their attention from the speaker to the screen, quickly tuning out the presenter and
concentrating solely on the text. If slides utilize fonts that are not easy to read or they
overwhelm readers with too much text, the ultimate outcome is that viewers, who have
stopped listening, eventually stop reading too, losing all interest in the presentation
because the material shown was not able to trigger an emotional response.
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There are however recent studies that present and promote alternative uses of the
software, so that it can be correctly utilized in an educational setting. For example, Lai,
Tsai and Yu (2011) propose a Two-Layer display of information on screens to avoid
overloading students with information. Kumar’s (2013) study supports the position
described above, indicating that students preferred PowerPoint over blackboard-based
lectures, because the “inherent deficiency of each method is compensated by the other.
While blackboard teaching is deficient in showing three dimensional diagrams,
animated videos, and sounds; the same can be demonstrated using a PowerPoint
presentation” (p. 240).
A solution to this dilemma is provided by the assertion-evidence structure utilized with
group 3 in the present study. This structure proposes the use of full sentences instead of
phrase sentences, which are typically fragments of phrases and do not help viewers
comprehend immediately what is being shown in the slide and, most of all, do not
favour retention of the subject matter. Alley and Robertshaw (2004) suggest placing the
sentence headline in the upper-left corner of the slide, so that the audience sees the
headline before anything else on the slide and to favour a quick retention, it should be
no more than two lines long and justified left.
Several good reasons exist for using sentence headlines. One is that a sentence headline
forces the presenter to come to rehearse and carefully select the assertions he or she is
making (Alley 2003, 2004, Alley and Robertshaw 2004, Gottlieb 1985). The presenter
is in a better position to select the best evidence to support those assertions because s/he
has clearly established what the assertions of the presentation are when s/he wrote the
easily-readable headlines to display on the slides. A second reason is that using sentence
headlines makes the set of slides stand-alone better as a set of notes. For instance, if a
slide simply had the headline “Results,” it would not be nearly as helpful to the
audience two weeks later when viewed as part of a set of notes. The ‘Results’ slide
displaying a short headline, summarizing the main results is much more effective and
useful once notes are re-read at home.
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A third reason for the value of sentence headlines is that presentations using sentence
headlines tend to have significantly fewer slides (Alley and Robertshaw 2004), thus
reducing the frenetic pace that weakens so many presentations. The reason for the
reduction in the number of slides is that if the presenter cannot write a sentence for the
slide that states its assertion, the design calls for the elimination of the slide (Alley
2003, Gottlieb 1985).
Once the presenter has established what the main concept of the slide is with the
sentence headline, he or she supports that concept primarily with images and with words
(where needed). Images, if well-conceived, can in fact communicate information much
more quickly to the audience than blocks of text. If a block of text must be included in a
slide, it should be no longer than two lines, including the headline, because audiences
are much more likely to read blocks of text with one or two lines than longer blocks.
Because audiences are more likely to remember lists of twos, threes, and fours than lists
of fives, sixes, or sevens, lists with more than four items should be avoided. Moreover,
when a long list is presented, the audience sees the length, perhaps reads the first couple
of items, and then tends to give up on the remaining items. When a long list must
necessarily be included in a slide, presenters should then place only the four most
important items from that list onto the slide and reserve the less important items for the
speech (Alley and Robertshaw 2004).
Another useful technique that comes with the use of the assertion-evidence structure is
to be generous in the use of white space, because it prevents a slide from seeming
overcrowded (Hill 2004). White space not only allows the audience to separate the
items in the slide’s body, but also helps viewers find a logical order in which to view
them.
Presenting something following a non-standard PPT layout requires a deep
understanding of the subject matter as bullet point prompts are no longer available.
Therefore, the assertion-evidence structure demands a much greater preparation by the
presenter than a standard PPT presentation, besides the difficulty of applying changes to
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the typography and layout of slides. However, as the previous section demonstrated, the
results of applying this new design are well worth the effort.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
The present research has highlighted the potentialities of presentation software such as
Microsoft PPT, as well as the numerous criticisms this genre has collected in recent
years. PPT slides have become the standard format to present ideas and transfer
knowledge not only in governmental and business settings, but within the academy as
well.
In the humanities, PPT presentations have spread incredibly fast and have become the
norm not only in classrooms but also in academic conferences and seminars. Viewers
have come to expect (and respect) what has been defined as ‘group wall reading’, often
not realizing that PPT slides are not always the best vehicle of information and can
easily become a medium, which hinders communication instead of facilitating it.
There are numerous faults inherent to the software, such as the fact that very little
information can be conveyed on each slide, limiting content to a series of bulleted lists
and fragmented sentences. Microsoft automatically suggests a standard form of
presentation, rich in special effects that can be visually appealing but also unnecessarily
distracting. All these elements allow slides to dominate over the speaker and instead of
being a means to enrich messages, slides become the message itself. The dominance of
projected slides over the speaker often means that presenters forego an important
opportunity to connect with the audience and in many cases the message is lost because
of a lack of clarity, overwhelming information or simply a lack of interest.
Given the numerous drawbacks this software has, why should academics still use it?
Because, as the results of this research have demonstrated, despite its potentially
dangerous features, a PPT - if well used - can become a tremendously effective
communication tool. Because of its multimodal nature, it is capable of combining text,
but also images, graphs, movies and music. If slides are properly reorganized, redundant
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text and disturbing special effects eliminated, and images are added to complement the
message, a PPT can become an excellent medium of communication.
In order to achieve this aim, a presenter must necessarily regain confidence in his/her
oratorical skills, allowing slides to simply enrich and accompany what the presenter has
to say, instead of dominating the presentation with redundant text, lists and graphs,
which are bound to be read aloud, sadly distancing the presenter from the audience.
Making a transition from the now ‘traditional’ slide format, to a format such as the
assertion evidence structure, is not an easy and requires substantial work, a deep
knowledge of the subject matter and most of all, enough confidence to ‘navigate solo’,
not using the software as a mere prompter but as an accompanying and enriching tool.
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Received: 6 May 2018
Accepted: 23 July 2018
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