386 Part 4 Public Speaking
Outlining Your Speech
At this point, you have all of the building blocks for a successful speech. Now
you’re ready to pull all of your hard work together in the form of an outline—a
structured form of your speech content (Fraleigh & Tuman, 2011). An effective
outline helps you confirm that your points are arranged clearly and properly,
ensures that you’ve cited your all-important research, and assists you in yourTHINK
ABOUT
THIS❶ The use of visuals
during lectures and
presentations is nothing
new—instructors and
presenters made use of
overhead projectors and
slide shows for decades
before computers arrived
on the academic scene.
Why is Tufte being so hard
on speakers who
use them now?
❷ We’ve spent much of
this chapter talking about
the importance of outlin-
ing and of communicating
your final outline clearly to
your audience. How is that
different from presenting
your outline in slide form?
❸ Are there some sub-
jects or types of speeches
that lend themselves to
software presentations?
Are there others that
don’t?Bullets on the Brain
There is something sinister in the world of public speaking. You’ve undoubt-
edly been exposed to it, at work or at school. It’s probably in your home com-
puter. But it’s not a virus. You probably paid to have it there. And according to
one of the nation’s leading experts, it’s making all of us stupid.
Edward Tufte is a professor of political science, computer science and
statistics, and graphic design at Yale University and has been academia’s
most influential voice on the subject of the visual display of information for
over two decades. He is an expert on the use of graphs and visual aids to
explain all types of information, from train schedules to empirical data. He
uses computers all the time to crunch numbers and present quantitative
information. But Tufte is no fan of presentation software (such as Microsoft
PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, Google Presentations, and Prezi). The problem,
Tufte (2003) explains, is that programs like PowerPoint force presentations
into an outline format, with little development beyond a series of bulleted
lists. Because a typical slide contains a mere forty words—about eight sec-
onds of reading—presentations become a succession of short, boring lists
of facts, presented out of context and with little room for evaluation.
Of course, current software programs offer you the opportunity to do more
than just present bulleted lists. They can add real visual interest to a speech,
enabling you to easily share photographs, cartoons, charts, and graphics with
an audience. If your presentation includes a lot of data, the use of a few simple
graphs can help you to quickly convey quantitative information, rather than just
rattling off numbers that your audience is likely to have a hard time visualizing.
The problem comes in when presenters rely on the program to design the con-
tent of their speeches rather than to enhance it. Tufte finds that a program’s
format “routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content” (Tufte, 2003).
The best remedy? Make sure you’ve got good content and only use vi-
sual displays that really convey meaning. A solid graph, for example, doesn’t
just present numbers: it helps the audience to understand the numbers you
are presenting. As one tech writer, drawing on Tufte’s work, explained, “When
you’re putting together a chart, you’re trying to show one of four things with
the data you have: a relationship between data points, a comparison of data
points, a composition of data, or a distribution of data” (Henry, 2012). Most
importantly, remember that pictures may be pretty, but content is still king. “If
your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers,” Tufte writes.
“If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t
make them relevant.”WIREDFORCOMMUNICATION