Present Beyond Measure

14The Lethal Downside of Bullet Points

“Bullet points are not the point.”

—Seth Godin

We've arrived at possibly the most pervasive and challenging slide design habit to kick. It's a form of slide fluff so deeply ingrained in our practices that I routinely observe visceral resistance when I call it out during workshops. So I'm going to be direct and state it outright:

Bullet points are murdering your presentations. That's probably why they're called bullets, because I can't think of any other logical reason for their name.

Allow me to illustrate: take a look at the real PowerPoint slide in Figure 14.1.

FIGURE 14.1 Slides with a wall of bullet points describing glacial formations

Pop quiz: who is the only person in the room who wants to see all these bullets at once like this? If you're thinking it's the audience, think again.

The answer is… you, the presenter!

This all-too-familiar slide is artfully arranged into a structure I call “the Wall”: an oppressive block of long-winded, run-on sentences written in PhD thesis language. And I guarantee if you display your insights in wall form, the only glacial formation in the room will be your stakeholders’ icy stares.

This is because blocks of bulleted text expose all your information at once. This locks up their attention as they are subconsciously triggered to read the entire slide word for word to themselves and completely ...