Tufte on PowerPoint

Do you know Edward R. Tufte's little book, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2003)?

If you have ever given a PowerPoint presentation, or ever had to sit through a presentation at which a speaker recited a list of bullet points while you sat in a dark room gazing at the same bullet points, you'll find Tufte's book fascinating. In twenty-seven large-format pages of text and graphics, Tufte, professor emeritus, Yale University, eviscerates PowerPoint. Tufte argues that PowerPoint shapes not only what is on screen but the whole logic of reports and presentations, constraining discourse and communication with "PowerPoint Phluff," branding, sales-pitch simple-mindedness, low resolution typography, the dilution and obscuring of complex thinking, cluttering and distortion of statistical evidence, and simple-minded sequencing.

Today is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a masterpiece of eloquence that has made it a useful tool with which to parody rhetorical mediocrity, as in Oliver Jensen's famous "Gettysburg Address in Eisenhowerese" from 1957. Tufte's little book reproduces Peter Norvig's "The Gettysburg Address PowerPoint Presentation," produced with the PowerPoint AutoContent Wizard.

You may not always agree with Tufte's arguments, but his detailed and principled analyses of visual arguments are a delight to read and if you start with his PowerPoint tract you will want to move on to his longer works -- Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Evidence, and Beautiful Evidence.