What are the causes of presentations?

Based on this original question Lousy PowerPoint presentations: The fault of PP users? the author of this original article found an approach to the common defense of bad PowerPoint presentations as that they are the “fault of the user, not the tool.”

This point raised by PP advocates in fact provokes a rich and complex question about nearly any type of expressive performance: What are the causes of presentations?

Let’s read some excerpts on these matters from the author’s essay on PowerPoint, a case of study:

Competitive Analysis of Presentation Tools

The comparison of various presentation tools in action indicate that PowerPoint is intellectually outperformed by alternative tools.

For 10 case studies and 32 control samples, PowerPoint flunks the comparative tests except for beating Pravda in the statistical graphics competition.

What are the causes of visual presentations?

An important but complex issue in evaluatin visual presentations including PowerPoint is what are the causes of a presentation?

What are the contributions of content quality, presenter skills, presentation methods, cognitive styles and prevailing standars of integrity?

To begin with, reasonable certain answers are that the causal strucutre is multivariate, that causes tend to interact and are not independent of one another and that improvements will result from working on all factors.

Read the full story