Brevity is the soul of wit

One of the skills we focus on in college is the art of presenting.  What it has become all too often  is a focus on making pretty PowerPoint slides, often using flash, sometimes with embeds, and then reading the slides to the audience. The result is that the form distracts from the content, and in fact the focus often becomes the form itself.  Students are getting very good at creating PowerPoints, but the presentations are no better, and may be worse, than the old poster-board days.

So how can students, and anybody else for that matter, make interesting and informative presentations?  One interesting attempt is something called pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"), which applies a simple set of rules to Power-Point presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each for a total of six minutes and 40 seconds of well-matched words and images. The result, when done well, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform PowerPoint pap into compelling beat-the-clock performance art.

While it might be argued that this is just another focus on form rather than content, what it does do is force the presenter to distill the critical information to that which is most meaningful and absorbable for the audience.  It's kind of a variation on the old editing axiom that if one can understand the point without that sentence, then eliminate that sentence.  The 20x20 is just a fun gimmick for driving home the point that the point is the point.