Abstract:

The skills necessary to be a good communicator today are completely different than in the past. Today literacy is about understanding visual communication and the great power that imagery has for conveying importante messages. It´s posible to make great slides presentations with appropiate content arranged in the most graceful manner. In this paper I´ll try to make an approach to some paths to designing presentations with Power Point.

Each year, more than 250 million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint produce trillions of presentation slides worldwide. Many of these presentation slides are long and boring because they reduce the personal connections between the presenter and audience. That´s why we have to be critical thinkers about when this medium is appropriate and when it is not.
Nowadays the live talks are about storytelling and have more in common with the art of documentary film than the reading of a paper document. Creating presentations should be a creative process. However harsh criticism of this design of presentation slides has surfaced because many people think that Microsoft PowerPoint's defaults oversimplify the subject matter, sometimes with serious consequences. We all know that the current state of presentations in academia causes its own degree of suffering for students and for proffesors alike. Another failing of the traditional design of slides is the reliance on bullet lists to provide cogent evidence for assertions. In this sense bullets are too generic and they leave critical relationships unspecified. Visual evidence in the body of the slide also has major advantages over the traditional bullet list.
One assumption of this paper is that slides are an appropriate visual aid for the talk. Another assumption is that the primary purpose of the slides is to help the audience understand and remember the content, rather than to provide talking points for the speaker.

If we desire to communicate with clarity, beauty and intelligence we must beyond what is considered to be normal to something different. According to my own experience audiences learn better from relevant images coupled with words than from words alone. In fact, many of the cognitive researchers asserts that multimedia is more effective when images are placed close to and presented simultaneously with corresponding text.
In many ways, we have to challenge the conventional knowledge of making PowerPoint presentations in today´s world and encourages the students to think differently about the communicaton with their proffesor.

Keywords:

Visual communication, imagery, slides presentations, Power Point.