Common Use of PowerPoint versus the Assertion–Evidence Structure: A Cognitive Psychology Perspective

INTRODUCTION Since 2001, harsh criticism of PowerPoint’s presentation slide structure has surfaced in several popular publications: “Absolute PowerPoint,” The New Yorker (Parker 2001); “PowerPoint Is Evil,” Wired (Tufte 2003b); “Is PowerPoint the Devil,” The Chicago Tribune (Keller 2003); and “Research Points the Finger at PowerPoint,” The Sydney Morning Herald (Patty 2007). Because Microsoft PowerPoint controls 95% of the market for presentation slideware (Parker 2001), its default structure certainly deserves scrutiny. However, what is more important than analyzing the default structure of PowerPoint is to analyze the slide structures that people actually use. For that reason, in technical communication, the key question is the following: what slide structures are commonly used for presenting science and technology? To answer this question fully, one would have to examine representative samples of slides from the different types of technical presentations: project, research, design, marketing, and so forth. One would also have to consider presentation slides created in the major languages: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, and Arabic. Moreover, one would to have to consider slides in each of these different languages created by native speakers versus nonnative speakers. In short, the challenge of determining the common practice of slide design in technical communication is daunting. Nonetheless, in this paper, we attempt a “first-cut” estimate of what the common practice is for slides in technical presentations. Having such an estimate, even if rough, would be valuable because it would put into perspective the criticism of PowerPoint published thus far. For example, if only a relatively small percentage of slides follow PowerPoint’s defaults, questions about the efficacy of those defaults are moot. In our first-cut estimation, we analyzed 2,000 slides from project and research presentations given in English by three different groups: professionals at North American laboratories and companies; scholars at a North American engineering conference; and nonnative speakers of English attending graduate schools in Northern Europe. Why focus on project and research presentations? From a perspective of science and technology, these types of presentations are important, often occurring before large audiences. From the perspective of data analysis, these types of presentations include slides with a wide range of purposes—from primarily informative to primarily persuasive. From a logistical perspective, representative sets of these types of presentations are accessible within the public domain and are not as limited by proprietary restrictions as other presentation types are. In our analysis, we looked for the frequency of specific slide features and the degree to which those features adhered to or broke away from PowerPoint’s default settings for placement and form of both the headline and the body. In our analysis, we did not specifically target slides created by the readers of this journal: technical managers, technical editors, technical artists, technical writers, and technical communication instructors. The reason is that Technical communication has published several recent articles that critically analyze the default slide structure of PowerPoint (Doumont 2005; Farkas 2009; Manning and Amare 2006)