According to Jared Sandberg in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, 30 million PowerPoint presentations are given around the world every day, even though most of them bore people senseless.

He asks, why do we put up with it?

As a speechwriter, I think that is a very good question. The answer, according to Mr. Sandburg, appears to be a combination of fear and inertia.

Most people are terrified of public speaking, so PowerPoint serves a kind of teddy bear or security blanket to help nervous speakers through the motions of giving a talk. Unfortunately, such regressive behavior tends to produce infantile presentations as, for example, “This slide shows our corporate headquarters.” Followed by, “This slide shows our corporate headquarters at sunset.”

At the same time, most people seem to think that it’s a waste of energy to buck 30 million PowerPoint presentations a day. So inertia sets in. The members of the mostly captive audiences resign themselves to boredom. Worse, they compliment speakers on their poor PowerPoint presentations, in the hope that those whom they praise will be equally charitable to them when their turn comes.

If there’s no penalty for being boring or banal, why should speakers or their staffs try to improve the quality of their presentations? To be fair, the problem is not PowerPoint per se, but its misuse. Used creatively and with discretion, PowerPoint can be an asset to a well-thought-out presentation. The problem is that it’s too often used as a substitute for the creativity and hard work that are essential to producing a good speech.

A slapdash presentation that merely wastes people’s time is an insult to the audience. But if audiences are going to let themselves be imposed upon without protest, why should the presenters care? Mr. Sandberg quotes one Dave Paradi, co-author of a book on PowerPoint, as saying that many executives “seem to be surprised that they should think about the audience before they think about what their saying.”

This is rank heresy for any professional speechwriter. But professional speechwriters may well be doomed to obsolescence by the electronic presenter.

Then again, maybe not. Mr. Sandberg’s column reports that there are signs of an incipient revolt against the triviality and sheer tedium of PowerPoint. Some companies and conference organizers are banning its use. Other companies are training their employees to make effective presentations without it.

Sometimes, all it takes is a CEO with too much respect for his time to see it wasted by a poor presentation. Jack Welch, who increased GE’s market value by over $400 billion in 20 years, was a CEO of that particular stripe. Confronted with a bumbling speaker who was using PowerPoint as a crutch, Welch cut him short by saying, “Excuse me; I can read the slides as well as you can. Why not just hand them to me?”

Just so. As a speechwriter, I say that if an occasion is worth a speech, the speaker should give a real speech – not read captions off a screen.