Why don't people do this?
PowerPoint blindness
Presentation slides generally contain what the presenter knows, not what the audience wants to see. There is invariably too much text and too little clarity. This is a link to a novel and provocative (hopefully) 5-minute presentation on not reading off your own slides. It is a silent presentation, if you can imagine such a thing.
Expert-novice gap
Experts tend to speak in the general (equations, definitions, high-level jargon) whereas novices engage in the concrete (real-life examples, analogies, demonstrations). This link is to an excerpt (10 minutes) from an online lesson on this topic explaining something called the ‘communication chain’ which throws light on the mistakes that experts often make when communicating with novices.
Story phobia
People tell stories in conversations but not in presentations. This surprising (and very damaging) finding is explained in this study carried out in UCD in 2012. This is one of many hidden biases that affect how people structure the presentations without even realizing it.
Click here to connect to the Technical Communication homepage.