TJ Walker argues that PowerPoint isn't a crutch for weak speakers, it's an anchor. When presenters read slides instead of rehearsing and engaging the room, the tool makes them worse, not better. He pushes presenters to prepare stories and actually look at their audience.
Chapters
Here's a common thing I hear from time to time. I'm sure you do too. A speaker, a business executive, quite often will say, oh, I use PowerPoint, but I sort of use it as a crutch. What do they really mean by that? Let's dig a little deeper there. When I think of a crutch, a literal crutch, it serves a great purpose. If my leg is broken and I can't put any weight on my right leg, a crutch keeps me from falling down. A crutch will actually allow me to walk across the room even though one of my legs is broken. A crutch is a great thing. It actually helps me accomplish what I'm doing. When it comes to PowerPoint, if you're an awful, boring speaker and you don't want to rehearse, you don't want to prepare interesting stories, so you throw together a bunch of slides that have a bunch of bullet points and text, then you proceed to ignore your audience. Read from the bullet points while staring at the screen. You can say you're using it as a crutch, but are you? In what way is it propping you up? In what way is it helping you get across the room the way a real crutch does? In what way is it helping you minimize pain? In what way is it helping any goals you might have? It's not. It's actually making you look worse. It's not disguising any flaws you have. Again, a real clutch crutch in real life will help mask the flaw of one of my legs not working. I can still get across the room. But if you're an awful presenter and you're using PowerPoint as a so called crutch, it's not actually serving as a crutch. It's not helping you. It's not propping up, it's making you worse. So please, if you think that PowerPoint is about propping you up, you are severely mistaken. If you are a boring speaker, if you have no stories, if you're not willing to actually look at people, if you're not willing to engage Your audience, your PowerPoint slide is not going to help you in the least. In fact, it will actually make things worse. Because people are going to watch you cowering in the corners, in the shadows, meekly referring to your slides, attempting to read your slides, boring everyone to death, and no one is going to be thinking, boy, oh boy, sure is a good thing that fellow or that person had a PowerPoint slide to prop him up. No, they're going to think awful presentation. Good time for me to check my email.
