A long long time ago I wrote a piece about the work of Edward Tufte — “data artist” and scourge of badly presented information — and I suppose that is why I found, in my mailbox upon my return from vacation, a copy of a new booklet he has written, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.“
It’s a wonderful broadside against the use of PowerPoint to dumb down the relationship between speaker and audience. Here’s one choice bit:
PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. |
Tufte — whose analysis of failures in the presentation of data preceding the Challenger space shuttle disaster is one of the highlights of his previous work — also deconstructs a slide from a Boeing PowerPoint report on the damage to the Columbia shuttle. And the booklet offers a reprise of Peter Norvig’s hilarious PowerPoint rendition of the Gettysburg address.
The thing is all of 24 pages, but as Tufte’s readers know, he packs a lot into a page.
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