Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

This pamphlet surprised me.  I assumed the text would be more liberal regarding the effectiveness of Powerpoint presentations.  I was happy to see Tufte take a stand against Powerpoint.  I haven’t had much experience with PP, only as a viewer not as a creator (although J-man, my roomie during four years of undergrad, was required to create PP presentations seemingly every week, so I had the exciting honor of watching  bullet pointed slides being born.  However, in my roomie’s defense, he tried to liven the presentation by adding random pictures of Han Solo, Jawas, and Jabba the Hutt to the pages.  Needless to say, it confused his audience: they couldn’t figure out how Star Wars related to Economics.  In actualiy, it didn’t relate whatsoever).

Even though I have never created PP presentations, I am not a fan of experiencing such presentations. Like Tufte mentons on page 15, presentors should distribute hand-outs to the audience.  Not only can participants more effectively relate to the info, they also can look over the info at home if they so desired. I believe this is important.

Powerpoint simplifies information to the point of ambiguousness.  I do not believe there is a problem with handing out complex texts to the audience and teaching the audience about the texts.  Such an approach aids mental containment of information because the audiences’ brains are pushed to think more analytically about relevent data.