DocBug

I saw a great talk a couple of weeks ago arguing for the abolishment of the bullet point list in technical talks. The basic arguments were quite persuasive: technical talks are generally about presenting complex relations between items and putting those relations in a list format flattens them out, making them more difficult to understand.

More to the point, if you're giving a talk, you are presenting in a medium of words. Putting lots more words up on your slides doesn't add anything, but just detracts from what you're saying. Instead, you should be showing pictures (figures, graphs, photographs, diagrams, illustrations). These are worth 1000 words, I'm told. The pictures can have words too, of course, like labels on graphs or headlines. The key is that those words are serving the pictures and the pictures are in turn supporting what you're saying.

What was my point? Oh yeah, slideshows in CSS are neat, but not that useful if you're just going to read bullet points aloud to your audience. If you're not going to do that, then you might as use a tool that lets you graphically lay out the information rather than waste your time doing it in code.

That's a good point (was that a Tufte talk by any chance?).

Personally I still like bullet points (maybe my talks just aren't that technical...) but if at all possible I want some sort of image people can hang their hats on and I don't want any single bullet to wrap — both of which really want a WYSIWYG to do well...