Presentations are often full of bullet point slides. Ostensibly this is to help the audience identify and recall the main points of the talk. In practice, the bullet points serve as a crutch for the speaker. In the worst case, the talk devolves largely into a verbatim recitation of densely packed bullet points: a guaranteed soporific. In any case, the speaker is competing with the slides. Should the audience members read the bullet points or listen to the speaker? They try to do both, but people are notoriously bad at multi-tasking.

For boring speakers, I may read the bullet points quickly, and if that seems sufficient, I can return to my email until the next slide, while the speaker drones on. For more interesting speakers, I may purposely ignore the bullet points to focus on the speaker. There may be information in the bullet points that the speaker does not address, but rather than worrying about reading it before the slide changes, I can console myself with the knowledge that my memory of the talk will be subject to rapid exponential decay anyway.

So if not bullets, what should be on the slides? I plan to address that in a future post.