Now, Just Watch Your Next Step!

You want to use Microsoft PowerPoint well enough, yes? My professional advice is (and it’s free): Begin with Microsoft Word. I’m a joker, but PowerPoint is no joke – if you don’t get it, you become a jester in a court of no appeal.

I’m writing this, meaning from scratch to finish, as on a car, in Word 2003, my sweetheart of a software till death do us part, from morning to evening of today, October 11, Thursday in Manila. I’ll now make my point clear; in fact, I have several power points to make:

If you have nothing to say, don’t say it with PowerPoint. You’ll only make it plainer and plainer with every slide you show.

If you have very little to say, don’t say it in words: Use tarpaulin, create a poster. Now, please remember: A harried poster is worth a thousand words, none of them pleasing.

If you have much to say, you’ve got a problem! That’s why I insist that you use Microsoft Word first. First, you have to have your thoughts good-looking before you think of showing them off to others. Remember, above all, a PowerPoint presentation is to show beauty & brains – the beauty of your presentation, the existence of your brain.

If not, you’re wasting your time – and mine. Remember, I’m paying you: I’m paying you my attention.

I’m not into working with PowerPoint – no Sir, or Madam, as the gender may be – as it is (almost) Greek to me (I’m Ilocano), but I know enough of it and I’ve seen enough presentations to say it has become, like tap water in the boondocks of Los Baños, colorless and tasteless. In other words, PowerPoint has become a tool for the intellectually lazy. Which all goes to show you don’t need to exert any effort to be lazy.

So, it’s time to pick your brains: It’s best to do it yourself! But let me help you in that by giving you Frank’s 10 Steps To PowerPoint. I made it easy for you, lazybones, slouch potatoes: it’s all in an acronym. My POWERPOINT, my acronym, means that you have to write well first before you can present well. You’re a good teacher if you are good in organizing ideas in the first place. There are no two ways about it. Only a lawyer has that enviable choice, you know the joke: To win a case, if a lawyer has the facts, he pounds on the facts; if he doesn’t have the facts, he pounds on the table.

That explains those many a sound and theory signifying nothing at many a Senate hearing in aid of legislation in the Philippines. That’s why I think we should ban lawyers from becoming legislators, especially Senators – they have an abundance of words and not an abundance of works. Do they think by their words they will be saved from damnation?

In short: Write first, present next. If you insist on writing (and revising) in PowerPoint, you are making yourself miserable – or somebody else PowerPointing for you. If PowerPoint were as easy as ABC, you probably won’t bother reading this; as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t have bothered writing it. Pity! If you don’t pity yourself, please practice pity on somebody else.

I had this epiphany today, after my friend Dr O emailed me on a presentation he wants to prepare; too, his knife cuts sharp when it comes to unthinking, unplanned, uninteresting, unreadable PowerPoint presentations. You can’t blame Bill Gates if his PowerPoint fails you – you have failed yourself.

My epiphany is this: To PowerPoint well is to write well first & foremost.

So now, let me give you some tips based on my golden years of writing from Asingan to Xavier – I mean I’m counting 50 years, not gold, not even my wizened gray hair. (I taught high school in Asingan, my hometown; I taught college at Xavier, the Jesuits’ University in Cagayan de Oro City. My first love is writing; my wife is my second – and she knows it.)

Frank’s 10 Steps To PowerPoint

1. Place yourself. (a) Get yourself a metaphor if possible. For instance, if you’re writing about energy, think to talk about candles (which, by the way, you can bring with you for dramatic effect). (b) Get a grip of your subject – narrow it down. Focus on something you can manage in the time allotted to you, for God’s sake. You can’t see clearly if the image is not focused, right? (c) Get more ideas by brainstorming with somebody. Just make sure to follow one rule: In brainstorming, there are no rules. I mean, simply accept everything said, no arguing, no debating. Relax! Then you will get more ideas.

2. Own it. At this point, I usually start with a working title, no matter how lousy or unattractive it is. The title keeps me focused on my subject. Title yours briefly – I always do mine. Like a run-of-the-mill long statement of vision or mission, a long title is not a title – it’s a story. You can’t tell a story if you don’t know yet what the whole story is all about. A brief working title will help you trim down fat, excess of information. If you can’t get it the first time, don’t worry. It happens to the best! It happens to me.

3. Widen your search. If you are about my age (67) or older, surely there are many things you know, including those you shouldn’t. I’m a world-wide reader; for instance, I have read the 7 books of Harry Potter by JK Rawlings, the first US dollars billionaire author in history. I’m in awe of Rawlings’ ability to write in a great many subtleties, wits and jokes; she must know much too much. For this one, I’m ransacking just my brain, because I too already know too much of the subject. At other times, I’m an Internet surfer, searching, waiting for insights. I shy away from newspapers because I get negative vibes; they discourage me from enjoying my day (or night), enjoying myself as I write.

4. Enter the dragon. I was born in a year of the Dragon, 1940. Do I believe in dragons? No, but they make interesting reading, and writing. Dragons, you will note, are mythical creatures – my advice for you is to take notes whatever you are doing, even while you’re searching, gathering materials. If you don’t put on paper the ideas that come to your head, they will become like dragons and become what they were in the first place: thin air, untraceable.

5. Review what you have. When do you stop gathering your materials and start writing? It’s a case-to-case basis, individual differences. In time, with practice, you will sense that you have more than enough materials for a story, article, or presentation. You can’t tell until you look at what you have and try to make sense out of the chaos. If you can’t make heads or tails, try looking for a quotation to set your mind at ease.

6. Proceed to rough draft. Just proceed, enough or not enough materials. Like I said, use Microsoft Word 2003, first. Word 2003 is perfect for me because it’s fast; I can magnify the view (click Zoom, click-choose say 150%); I can autocorrect my mistakes; I can import images simply by dragging from a folder into the document I’m working on; I can create a table of contents of a 100-page book correctly and faster than you can type califragilisticexpialidocious correctly. When I make the very first helter-skelter, incomplete draft – that’s why it’s called a rough draft – I write any which way, thoughts contending on thoughts, jostling each other. Never mind. Once you have succeeded in creating a chaos called a rough draft, complete or not, you’re well on your way to happy (if not great) writing.

7. Overcome Writer’s Block. 98.76% of the time, when writing you suffer ‘Writer’s Block.’ I think I’ll call it ‘Beginner’s Block.’ There is no such thing as perfect writing. Only once did that happen to me; when I was writing for The Evening Paper (ask Krip Yuson of Philippine Star, he was Editor), I sat in front of the PC at home and stood up about 2 hours later with a perfect piece that needed no revising. I have another one-in-a-million chance that that will happen to me again. And how do you overcome Writer’s Block? Learn to relax when you’re writing; don’t push yourself too hard; ask people what they think about the subject; read; go to the Internet – then go to sleep.

8. Improve it. Use the Grammar & Spelling Checker. Read for the 4 Cs. Is it Comprehensive? Is it Clear? Is it Coherent? Is it Concise? Comprehensive – Not long and not necessarily complete, but does your presentation cover the essential elements of the topic or subject you selected? Clear – Is your language understandable by your target audience? Do you know your target audience? If you do, do you speak their language? If not, get some help. Coherent – Do the sections, parts, ideas flow smoothly from one to the other? (Of course, if you’re funny, you can make a joke of it, especially if you are supposed to be funny.) Otherwise, if you are incoherent, your audience will never be able to follow you – which means you are leading them to the slaughter of the innocents. You’re guilty, not them!

9. Nice work if you can get it! Sometimes I’m writing at the middle, sometimes at the end, sometimes at the beginning. I’m writing in the middle right now, after writing at the end and then at the beginning. You have to revise (in fact, after writing 6 tips – see below – and uploaded this one on this website, I decided to make my list 7, magic number, so now you have 7; I also revised #1 & #2, so that all the tips begin with ‘No.’); if I remember right, it was Rudolf Flesch who said, ‘There is no good writing – there is only good rewriting.’ An unforgettable lesson from Flesch, who is the guru of all the writers in America today, in Europe, in the rest of the literate universe – he gave the world his Readability Formula and guidelines on how an author can become readable. I learned much from his book, How To Write, Think & Speak More Effectively.

10. Time to finalize. You have to end it all sometime. I remember the film The Agony & The Ecstasy, Michelangelo up there painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for several years now and no end is in sight. The Pope asks, ‘When will you make it end?’ And the painter replies, ‘When I am finished!’ Sooner or later, you will have to say, ‘I am finished!’ (This one, about 2,500 words in all, I will declare finished this evening and upload it with a photograph, a day’s work. Now I can report: I did it 7 to 7, AM to PM today.) When you’re not a seasoned writer, you’ll just have to feel your way and give it a good guess. Keep an open mind.

Next step, PowerPoint!

Exit from Word 2003. I’m thoroughly satisfied with my manuscript; I’m ready to export it to PowerPoint. Which is a problem, because I’m not so familiar with that software. So, I will give you advice not as an expert in PowerPoint but as an expert in criticizing those who make PowerPoint presentations. I’ll present to you a problem, then a solution.

1. No sense of size? One of the most frequent mistakes of presentors is the big table that even they can hardly read –how about you, are you trying to impress your listeners with how unsure you are with your numbers? Instead of a big table, break it down into parts and create a series of small tables that can be enlarged on the small screen. Remember Rudolf Flesch: Readability is #1.

2. No sense of sight? There are too many words in one slide that the font size has to be small to fit the words in – how about you, are you trying to impress your audience with how dense you are? Summarize the paragraph and explain it extemporaneously while showing the slide. If you can’t summarize, how can you expect the audience to digest the message?

3. No intro. Most presentors simply assume that the audience knows the subject and that they have a good background of the topic about to be discussed – how about you, are you trying to impress the audience how intelligent you think they are? You’re assuming too much. If you can’t give a good background, chances are you don’t know what you’re talking about.

4. No outline. Often, presentors don’t bother with an outline – how about you, are you trying to prove to the ones attending your lecture that you can remember everything without using an outline? Well, they can’t remember anything without it. That’s why I like Word 2003 – I can create an outline with it, then write my presentation on the basis of that outline.

5. No recap. Those who don’t bother introducing their topic don’t bother either summarizing what they have just said – how about you, are you trying to impress the listeners that if they can’t digest what you just presented, that’s their fault, not yours? On the basis of that Word outline, I can summarize my paper.

6. No contribution to knowledge, no insight. Those who don’t care about their audience just mouth what others have said, oftentimes plagiarizing what they have written – how about you, are you trying to tell those in front of you that there is nothing more to add to knowledge, or there is no other way to present it except what others have used? Shame on you!

7. No challenge. Those who are simply in a hurry to finish what they have begun just end the presentation with the last slide, oftentimes simply with a ‘Thank you!’ While it’s nice, a Thank you! doesn’t help people understand. How about you, are you trying to tell those attending the seminar that there is nothing more to be said or done after your presentation? To make your message memorable, leave them a challenge like, ‘Can you do it?’ or an exhortation like ‘You can do it!’ That implies that your presentation must be towards their being able to do whatever you want them to do, aside from paying attention to your presentation.

Don’t forget the lesson of the master: You want it done right, do it yourself! That means, you have to learn to use PowerPoint yourself, the basics at least in working with text, tables, images: select, cut, paste, insert, move, indent & space lines format fonts, create columns of text and numbers – don’t forget readability from a distance. That’s why my advice is: The shortest way to go to PowerPoint is via Microsoft Word (2003). The shortest distance between 2 points is not a shortcut but a detour. If you do your writing, revising, formatting and finalizing in Word 2003, you will have the least problems when you move to PowerPoint. Remember, Word 2003 and PowerPoint talk the same language perfectly: Microsoft. You can call it efficiency. I call it brains. Ours, not Microsoft’s – don’t use Microsoft, use your head!

Get the point? The power of PowerPoint is yours – if you can get it.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 9:36 am and is filed under creative photography, creative thinking, creative writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.