Writing short

Blossom Dearie, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2008

In my personal life I have long realized that I am both loquacious and garrulous (one of those is worse than the other, although I can't remember which). Blame the one sixteenth Irish in me if you like, or the fact that I was an only child, and, worse, the child of two youngest children from large families who must have had to become compelling communicators and storytellers in order to get any attention at all. When I am not in seriously reticent, information gathering mode, I do like to talk. As much as I want.

Perhaps it's because I enjoy communication and can usually analyze what I'm saying and what the other person is saying while it's happening that I have what seems to be an inbred hostility to PowerPoint. All the pitches to potential clients demonstrating my former firm's expertise and global capabilities were done as PowerPoint presentations over which a team of us had slaved for a week, with tweaks and suggestions from executive management. But, I said, you're not learning anything about the client when you're lecturing them in the dark. The C-suite loves 'the deck', I was told. It was a case of adapt or leave, so I adapted.

I have come to appreciate PowerPoint's value a bit more, but there are still times when communicators' mastery of it as a tool seems minimal. Reading a PowerPoint when you haven't attended a presentation is a lot like reading the chapter titles of a book, and if you're lucky you get the first paragraph of each chapter as well. As for those who insist that I click to get each new line of text - the supporting points for the presenter's assertions - I am warning you, you are not Pavlov, I am not a dog, and your information nuggets do not qualify as 'treats'. If you want to communicate with me, do not make me dig for information - you will only alienate me. Similarly, if there is no compelling reason to provide a visual, chances are good I'm not going to be amused by irrelevant graphics.

So I am thrilled to hear of a trend in PowerPoint that originated in Japan but has now been widely exported to the Western world, Pecha Kucha. Maximum 20 slides. Maximum 20 seconds per slide. Do your presentation, make it effective, then sit down and let the reaction and interaction begin. I'm a little alarmed by the suggestion that content is less important than form. But as a rule of thumb I think PowerPoints globally will be substantially improved, even if it's only because those who adopt the Pecha Kucha concept will time themselves and will learn to be a little more realistic in terms of the sheer volume of information they're trying to convey. PowerPoint is all about the highlights - it's not an alternative to writing a white paper or a case study. It's not really an appropriate vehicle for a case study either.

One of the biggest challenges I have ever faced in my writing career was writing one-sentence synopses of films that still managed to convey some idea of what the movie was about. I was lucky this came early enough in my career that it gave me a certain sort of discipline, as well as a lot of practice in distilling the essence of complicated subject matter into very few words. This has been incredibly helpful when crafting key messages for media relations clients who are then required to provide sound bites for radio and television. Short sentences are wonderful. Long sentences can be even more wonderful, but tend to be far less memorable. Ditto short versus long questions - "Where's the beef?" is still one of the most memorable questions in advertising history.

A shout out to my friend Mhairi Petrovic of Out-Smarts (see link in the links section), in one of whose blog posts I discovered the Melcrum network (now if only there was one that focused on external communications rather than internal), where I first read about Pecha Kucha:

http://www.internalcommshub.com/open/news/pechakucha.shtml

And for Wired's take on this trend:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-09/st_pechakucha#