PPTPPT

I wonder if each country has its own Powerpoint recipe. In America, I thought I had all the ingredients of a good presentation figured out – throw in some pictures, a few animations, and definitely only a pinch of text. But I’ve learned that in China, Powerpoints – or as they’re always called here, “PPTs” – are made a little differently.Last week I presented at a conference, using a PPT, of course. PPTs are now expected in China for teaching and presentations at every level, from academic conferences to rural elementary schools. They tend to be less image- and anecdote-based than Powerpoints in the US. In many of the classes I’ve taken here I’ve discovered it is OK to read off slides with huge, mind-numbing blocks of text for the majority of a presentation.

But as much as I know that it fits the rhetoric here better, I couldn’t bring myself to insert the dreaded text blocks into my PPT. I peppered it with images and animations, thinking that this would surely make the PPT more interesting. But before the conference, when I gave my presentation to my Chinese friends to proofread, they were perplexed by the number of pictures I had. You definitely need more blocks of text, they told me.

At the conference, I think I finally realized why text is preferred here. As I presented, I noticed that each time I clicked to a new slide, many audience members rose and took pictures of the slide. It was like watching spectators doing the Wave in a baseball stadium. Click. Ripples of people standing, snapping a photo, and sitting.

It occurred to me that in the bottleneck that is Chinese academia, where information-sharing is not a priority and resources are very difficult to access, conference PPTs are an important source of information for gleaning experts’ opinions. Conference-goers may never be able to access university libraries, but they can learn from the presenters, meticulously taking a photo of each slide and thus preserving a trove of information. And naturally, a block of text is much more useful than a picture to someone trying to remember what Professor so-and-so said.

I’m certainly no expert, and I question the value of taking pictures of my humble slides – but, I may be on to something with my highly academic PPT Theory.