In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
Sentences and words do not exist by themselves, but have natural, inevitable, unavoidable interactions with their surrounding spaces, words, and other sentences. Sentences are not independent of their spatial context, and interactions can create meanings and harms. Sentences survive content-indifferent and content-hostile spacings, but surviving is not thriving. Text space should not be owned and governed by generic productions grids, which make for convenient production but inconvenient meaning. Space can and should be content-responsive, actively contributing to meaning – forever practices in poetry, maps, math, computer code, comics, theater/movie scrips, posters. Subtle visual spacing differentiates and clarifies sentences, and meaning becomes more consequential, memorable, retrievable.