More disadvantages of using slides:

Wow, the more I think about it, I realize there are more disadvantages of using slides. Here are two more:

         

• Slides take out the human touch in presentations. Although people don’t realize it, the human touch is very important in effective communication. Tone, body language, gestures all make up a very significant part of the overall message that we deliver. With a big electronic display near the speaker, the audience gets distracted from the non-verbal cues that the speaker delivers. A lot of the message is diluted or completely lost.

• Slides can tend to waste everyone’s time. The presenter wastes time putting together slides which, instead of making the presentation effective, actually reduces the effectiveness. The audience, instead of focussing on the speaker, focusses on the slides and loses the main message.

Another disadvantage of using slides:

Speakers often forget that the human listening capacity and mental retention capacity are limited. So they can imbibe only a few key learning points in each session. Using slides makes presenters think that they can thrust as much information on the audience as they have on their slides. After all, you can have hundreds of slides in a single file ! But the human mind does not accept information that way. So speakers end up having numerous slides and make presentations that overwhelm the audience with information.

I took a minute to think about the most impactful speakers of all time. A few names popped into my mind immediately – Jesus Christ, Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King…(not in chronological order). Guess what – none of them used slides!