Bullet-points are a staple of any presentation’s visual slideshows. It’s not surprising since most of the popular presentation softwares are bundled with default templates that come with bullet-points. Now, if that doesn’t encourage their usage, I don’t know what does.
Quite The Contrary, They’re Rather Useful…
Now, I’m not saying that bullet-points are of no use in any presentation. Quite the contrary. They’re very useful in listing out the keywords for each individual point that you want to elaborate on. Very useful indeed… for the presenter, that is. However, they have no business being projected onto the projector screen for the audience to see. You see, bullet-points belong on the presenter’s screen (or flash cards if you’re old-school), hidden away from the audience, only visible to the presenter. They act to prompt the presenter with keywords for him or her to expand upon verbally.
It takes a lazy presenter to project the bulleted keywords onto the main presentation slideshow for the world to see. If you think you’re doing the audience a favour by not projecting whole sentences onto the screen for the audience to see, well, you’re not working hard enough. The visual slideshow is just that… for visual purposes only, not for the audience to read from. Instead, use other non-word visuals in its place. The audience only need to hear the details via a verbal elaboration from you, not by reading on the projector screen.
But Is There A Real World Use For Bullet-Points?
Actually, there is… While they have no use in the world of presentations (at least not on the business-end of it), there actually is a real world use for bullet-points….
