Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Why is your audience tilting their heads sideways?



























Perhaps they just are trying to read a vertical y-axis label on one of your slides, like the one on the following graph.





















It is another version of the one shown in my previous blog post on July 1st, which more sensibly used a horizontal label. Your software may default to a vertical y-axis label, but please don’t use it.

On July 3, 2017 at SlideMagic Jan Schultink posted about Vertical Axis Titles. He suggested that you skip both the vertical and horizontal axis text labels. Instead you can use a slide title (headline) with your message. In this case it would be:

How many millions of viewers watched the first four weeks
     of Megyn Kelly’s Sunday Night TV show on NBC?


That audience posture is known as the Goren Lean (from Vincent D’Nofrio’s portrayal of Detective Robert Goren in the TV show Law and Order - Criminal Intent). I blogged about it in a post on October 5, 2013 titled Hiding data in a Harlequin PowerPoint chart.
 
The image of a Jack Russell Terrier came from Wikimedia Commons

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