The high school project that taught a future author to ditch bullet points

When Garr Reynolds was seventeen, he built his first multimedia presentation for a high school biology project on the effects of pollution. This was years before PowerPoint existed. The slides were real slides: 35 millimeter transparencies loaded into carousel projectors, two of them working in sync so the images could cross-dissolve smoothly from one to the next, timed to a recorded soundtrack.

Because film was expensive and it took two weeks to get slides back from the lab, he couldn't afford to shoot carelessly. He had to think through the whole story first, on paper, before he ever picked up the camera: what he wanted to say, and exactly what kind of image would support each part of it. Only then did he go out to photograph evidence of both sides of his argument, the natural beauty at stake and the pollution threatening it.

What strikes him looking back is what his instructor emphasized instead of titles and bullet points: research, evidence, structure, and story, the idea of having a point that moves an audience from one place to another. Long before Reynolds had ever heard of concepts like cognitive load or the dual channels of learning, which describe how differently our brains process pictures and blocks of text, he already understood through pure experience that quality images paired with spoken narration worked better than narration competing with a screen full of words.

He connects this instinct to the way documentary filmmakers, especially Ken Burns, use still photographs. A photograph captures a single moment and gives the viewer time to slow down and absorb it, in a way that a cluttered slide of text simply doesn't allow. The lesson Reynolds draws is to avoid using images purely as ornamentation, and instead to illuminate a large, abstract topic by focusing on one small, specific, human story within it. He also points to the researcher John Medina, who argues in his book Brain Rules that our brains are far better at remembering pictures than at identifying and recalling text, which is exactly why Medina suggests professionals reconsider the text-heavy habits built into most slideware.

None of this required PowerPoint, or expensive equipment, or years of design training. It required Reynolds, at seventeen, treating his slides the way a documentary treats its footage: as evidence for a story, not as a script to read aloud.

Start your next presentation the way a seventeen-year-old with a roll of film and no PowerPoint once had to: work out your story on paper first, deciding exactly what you want your audience to understand and feel, before you go looking for a single image. When you do choose pictures, ask what each one proves or reveals rather than whether it looks polished, and where you can, let one specific, human example stand in for a bigger, more abstract issue. In the room, resist the habit of putting an image up and then describing it; instead, start talking about your next point while the previous slide is still showing, and only bring up the new image once you've already begun the thought. Treat your slides as evidence for what you're saying, never as the script itself.