- first published:
- Sep 27, 2026
- tags:
The slide-oriented user interface pattern used by PowerPoint® and similar tools incentivises the wrong user behaviour for writing effective presentations.
As a consequence, most PowerPoint® presentations are awful “Death by Powerpoint” experiences unless users actively work against their tools’ shortcomings.
Instead, presentation software should be much more like blogging.
The failure mode
A user will start up their slide-creation software, with the intent of, “I need to write a presentation.” They will then start filling in their presentation document one slide at a time, usually in short-hand bullet-point form, covering the things they want to talk about.
Once they’ve captured what they want to say, they then—time permitting—try to make their slides look prettier. This often involves applying a presentation template, sometimes supplied to them by their corporate communications department, which then has spaces for images. Users often then try to fill those gaps with awful clip-art ot stock imagery that tries to crudely hammer a point home with tedious metaphor. (Hooray, another slide with a light-bulb in it!)
(More advanced hell-slides will try to lay out concepts or ideas in what appears to be some kind of artful diagrammatic illustration that proports to show some conceptual interrelationships—but, more often than not, is just a less obvious way of laying out bullet-points.)
Then, when the user comes to deliver their presentation, they then read off the bullet-points on their slides in sequence, at about half the speed that everyone in the audience is able to do so directly as they ignore whatever it is the speaker is saying. (Sometimes the speaker will pause to elaborate a bit on a point, but not usually in a way that materially changes the result, and so they’re usually safe to ignore until the end.)
The outcome is, far too often, a miserable “Death by PowerPoint” experience for everyone involved.
This is all completely, totally, backwards. Because Slides are for presenting, not for reading. Users are effectively writing up their speakers notes onto their slides, where they distract from what your audience should be paying attention to: you, and what you’re saying.
So how should it work?
Presentation software should look more like a blog-post editor than a graphic design package, at least when you first start it up.
The ideal presentation software would give you a blank text-editor page, into which you would then outline your presentation as before.
Then, at any given point during the narrative, you should be able to drop a marker that allows you to express what you want the screen to transition to showing at that position—a graph, or an important assertion, an XKCD cartoon, a selfie, or whatever. I’ve seen extremely effective presentations where the background was just a rolling succession of cats.
Heck, given that one of the better alternative forms of a presentation is a blog-post, perhaps the best form of presentation software would be one that can produce both forms of output from the same input.
What’s the best way to write presentations with the tools we have today?
Right now, whenever I need to write a presentation, Powerpoint® (or, more likely, LibreOffice® Impress) is the last tool I load. Instead, I start with a text editor.
And then I think through what I want to say, and in what order, and I try to write that down. What is the point that I want to get across? What is the one key conclusion or data point that is I want the listener to take away from the presentation?
Only once I’ve figured out what I want to actually say do I start assembling the presentation document itself. For any given point in my script, I figure out what I want to be shown on the screen at that point to most effectively support the words that are coming out of my mouth: a graph, a highlight, a map, a news article, a 40pt conclusion, whatever.
And then, once that looks right, I labouriously transcribe my script into the individual notes sections of each of my presentation slides, both for my benefit when I’m delivering the presentation, and for the benefit of anyone who completely missed it and doesn’t have a recording to fall back on.
Hopefully, by the time I reach this point, I don’t have to make any big changes to it, becaues once the presentation is in this form, making any kind of non-trivial change is upsetting expensive.
But that’s what you’ve got to do these days to write effective presentations in tools like PowerPoint®.
And that’s why I think PowerPoint® is completely backwards.