Bullet Points

In a presentation slides,

• Bullets do not save time.
  Presentations aren’t about the most concise exposition of facts, they are about changing minds and stimulating actions.

• Bullets do not make it easier to remember what’s being said.
  Stories and analogies does.

• Bullets create tension about what the next bullet is going to say, instead of actually communicating your idea.
  When we see a bullet, we check it off and stop paying attention (if the presenter failed to catch the attention of the crowd), until the next one appears, we do not remember the previous bullets.

• Bullets are almost always misused. If you have a finite number of points, each of which supports the other, one can imagine that they help us fit the puzzle together. But that’s not how they’re used, are they?
  Most people use them the way I’m using them now, as a disorderly random list.

• You’ve already forgotten the second bullet, haven’t you?
  That’s because bullets don’t naturally map to the way we process and remember ideas.

• If bullets are the official style of your presentation, using them is a form of being invisible.Without a doubt, bullets make it far easier to READ your presentation to people in the room. For those with no time to practice or unable to say what’s in their heart, bullets are perfect.