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?
Taking notes has always helped me zero in on the interesting questions.
In taking field notes, the way to find these peculiarities is to keep track of as many observations that may not appear at the time to be relevant at all.
I’ve been keeping journals of one sort or another since I was a teenager, and if there is one thing I can now confidently say about all this scribbling and note-taking, it is that if it wasn’t written down, it didn’t happen. The more I wrote the more that did happen, because all this process stirs up ideas. Stopping to sit and write costs time and energy, and some biologists feel that it should be discouraged.
Note-taking helped transform me from a young boy on barefoot runs who passively observed the tangled bank of the Maine woods into a naturalist-scientist who is an active participant in unraveling the mysteries of the natural world.