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- 2003 - Edward Tufte - The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
- This was recommended to me by Richard M. as a(n) (partial?) explanation of why formatting an extended piece of prose in a computer-code-like style, where indentation indicates parent/child relationships, can make it harder for readers to follow.
- A rough summary:
- In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. (...) 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 Phruff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. PP slides projected up on the wall are very low resolution—compared to paper, 35mm slides, and the immensely greater capacities of the human eye-brain system. Impoverished space leads to over-generalizations, imprecise statements, slogans, lightweight evidence, abrupt and thinly argued claims.
(...)
PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector for low-resolution materials. And that's about it. PP has some occasionally useful low-end design tools and way too many PhlufF tools. No matter how beautiful your PP ready-made template is, it would be better if there were less of it. Never use PP templates for arraying words or numbers. Avoid elaborate hierarchies of bullet lists. Never read aloud from slides. Never use PP templates to format paper reports or web screens. Use PP as a projector for showing low-resolution color images, graphics, and videos that cannot be reproduced as printed handouts at a presentation.Paper handouts at a talk can effectively show text, numbers, data graphics, images. Printed materials, which should largely replace PP, bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday material in newspapers, magazines, books, and internet screens. A useful paper size for handouts at presentations is 11 by 17 inches (28 by 43 cm), folded in half to make 4 pages. This piece of paper can show images with a resolution of 1,200 dpi and up to 60,000 characters of words and numbers, the content-equivalent of 50 to 250 typical PP slides of text and data. Thoughtfully planned handouts at your talk tell the audience that you are serious and precise; that you seek to leave traces and have consequences. And that you respect your audience.
- In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. (...) 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 Phruff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. PP slides projected up on the wall are very low resolution—compared to paper, 35mm slides, and the immensely greater capacities of the human eye-brain system. Impoverished space leads to over-generalizations, imprecise statements, slogans, lightweight evidence, abrupt and thinly argued claims.
- Here's the portion that's most-relevant to the criticism Richard was making:
Bullet Outlines Dilute Thought
Impoverished resolution coerces slide-makers into using the compressed language of presentations—the bullet list of brief phrases. Bullets, little marks sometimes decorative or cute, signal the beginning of each phrase for those unable to recognize it. Sometimes the bullet hierarchies are so complex and intensely nested that they resemble computer code.By insisting that points be placed in an orderly structure, the bullet list may help extremely disorganized speakers get themselves organized. The bullet list is surely the most widely used format in corporate and government presentations. Bullets show up in many paper reports, as presenters simply print out their PP slides.
For the naive, bullet lists may create the appearance of hard-headed organized thought. But in the reality of day-to-day practice, the PP cognitive style is faux-analytical. A study in the Harvard Business Review found generic, superficial, simplistic thinking in the bullet lists widely used in business planning and corporate strategy. What the authors are saying here, in the Review's earnestly diplomatic language, is that bullet outlines can make us stupid:
<HBR-quote>In every company we know, planning follows the standard format of the bullet outline... [But] bullet lists encourage us to be lazy in three specific, and related ways.
• Bullet lists are typically too generic. They offer a series of things to do that could apply to any business....
• Bullets leave critical relationships unspecified. Lists can communicate only three logical relationships: sequence (first to last in time); priority (least to most important or vice versa); or simple membership in a set (these items relate to one another in some way, but the nature of that relationship remains unstated). And a list can show only one of those relationships at a time.
</HBR-quote>- This seems to be an argument against the general use of bullet outlines when those outlines must be extremely condensed, and not an argument against the use of bullets in all circumstances, or an argument against formatting extended prose in a hierarchical structure using a combination of bullets and numbers. If you read what he says, it doesn't even seem like he's claiming here that it's impossible to have a useful hierarchical bullet outline in a Powerpoint presentation; instead, it seems like he's saying that situations in which such a format would be the best option available to the presenter are so uncommon that such a format shouldn't be the standard practice.
- Based on the rough summary, I don't actually think this essay argues against formatting prose in bullets per se; it's an argument against using a presentation-style that 1. encourages the presenter to leave important detail out of their presentation, and 2. makes it difficult for people to understand / follow the material that is being conveyed. I still believe it's possible–in certain circumstances–to use hierarchically-structured prose that doesn't lead to those two bad outcomes.
- 2014.06.09 - Writing In The 21st Century: A Conversation with Steven Pinker
- 2014.12.22 - YouTube - Amit Agarwal - Recommended books for improving your writing
- Amit is a (well-known?) tech blogger
- His recommendations:
- The Elements of Style
- On Writing by Steven King
- On Writing Well
- Eats Shoots & Leaves
- New York Times styleguide
- AP style guide
- 2015.11.24 - Amazon - Randall Monroe - Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words
- Great idea, well-executed.
- 2017.07.14 - MuckRock.com - The Elements of Spyle: Lessons from the CIA’s classified guide to good writing
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