Clive Thompson wrote an essay in the New York Times Magazine that confirms what I’ve suspected all along: Powerpoint Makes You Dumb. Backed up by information presentation theorist Edward Tufte (Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information), Clive makes a compelling case that Powerpoint is contributing to the dumbing down of communication.
Powerpoint encourages very low density of information in each slide. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In a presentation, a couple of bulleted points on the overhead projector can serve to highlight and drive home the message delivered by a talented speaker.
Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed far too many business presentations in which the speaker merely reads directly from Powerpoint slides. In the effort to pare down information so it will fit on those little slides, anything meaningful is lost, a process that turns any presentation into a brief sales pitch.
If the speaker does go to the effort to cram lots of information onto those slides, more often than not the presentation turns into a snooze fest as the speaker reads every word verbatim. And if the speaker doesn’t dwell on every single word in every slide, the information whips past quickly enough that there’s no way to absorb it.
As early as the sixth grade, I learned the fundamentals of presenting information to a group of people. Cue cards are an important part of this process: a small stack of notes to guide the speaker through a presentation. Visual aids to the presentation are a separate item, usually containing little text and instead presenting a graphical display to augment the verbal information delivered by the speaker.
Where Powerpoint gets it wrong is in encouraging people to project their cue cards on the wall. Those notes are for the speaker and the speaker alone. There’s no reason for someone to verbalize text if everyone in the audience is going to read it themselves; you may as well run the presentation as a silent movie, swapping slides at long intervals. Or better yet, print it out or stick it on a Web page so they can read it at their leisure. Don’t insult your audience’s intelligence by assuming its members can’t read for themselves.
I’ve also seen too many companies, otherwise full of talented and intelligent people, that offer Powerpoint files as documentation. The short format and lack of useful document structure inherent to Powerpoint precludes its use for imparting information without help from a speaker. Please, if you think your information is important enough to publish for public consumption, give it the attention it deserves. Write a paper, or a book, or a help system, or a Web site; don’t foist sound bites and bullet points on your customers.
Don’t get me wrong, Powerpoint can serve a useful purpose. With some effort and skill, it can produce compelling visual aids for a verbal presentation, along with separate speaker’s notes (cue cards) that the audience need never see. However, it requires forethought and careful design to make an effective presentation. The wizards and default templates included with Powerpoint lull too many would-be presenters into thinking the project is mostly complete. Designing a presentation requires time, and should not be relegated to the last-minute status it all too often receives.
2 Comments
Please. Powerpoint doesn’t create faulty logic; faulty logicians do. Not to mention less-than-critical thinkers and writers who inappropriately double-count their sources in order to present compelling ‘evidence’ for their arguments. This would include Clive Thompson, for he cites NASA and Edward Tufte as his evidence that PowerPoint is evil–yet the Tufte volume that Thompson references is essentially a critique of NASA’s faulty usage of PowerPoint, so he’s only really using Tufte’s argument as evidence. Check that–he’s essentially REWRITING Tufte’s argument as presenting it as his own. Which would therefore place you in that category of misleading evidence double-counters as well, for you claim that Thompson’s “compelling argument” is “backed up” by Tufte’s research–when it simply IS Tufte’s research.
I don’t think that Powerpoint creates faulty logic. I don’t even think Powerpoint creates bad presentation design. It does encourage bad presentation design, though. Powerpoint tends to seduce the unwary, or the lazy, into thinking that tossing a few slides together and reading from them constitutes an effective way to communicate.
As I stated in my entry, I do think that Powerpoint can be used for effective presentations, if used correctly by someone willing to learn the craft of public speaking. However, it’s been my experience that far more people use Powerpoint badly than use it effectively.
I’ll concede that I’m double-counting evidence here. However, I’m primarily using Clive’s article as a lead-in for personal opinion and experience on the subject of Powerpoint, not as definitive proof of the quality or utility of Powerpoint. I ran across the article, and it compelled me to write down a chunk of my own thoughts that I’ve had in my head for some time now. My writing here isn’t particularly rigorous; it’s a rant, pure and simple.
It’s true that Thompson’s article doesn’t present much more than a rewrite of opinions expressed by Tufte. However, it’s an excellent summary of Tufte’s thoughts on the matter. I don’t think that restating someone else’s opinion is a bad thing, particularly when you agree with that opinion.
I also have a great deal of respect for the words and ideas of Edward Tufte. His thoughts on information design resonate well with my own views, so I tend to give his arguments a lot of weight. Then again, I didn’t need help from either Thompson or Tufte to create my personal dislike for Powerpoint.
“Powerpoint is evil” is, perhaps, too strongly worded. However, I like hyperbole; it makes for more interesting writing and keeps me from falling asleep at the keyboard.