The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Slides Are Not All Evil

Abstract

Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are turning out trillions of slides each year. Those of us who frequently attend presentations probably agree that most of these slides are ineffective, often detracting from what presenters are saying instead of enhancing their presentations. Slides have too much text for us to want to read them, or not enough for us to understand the point. They impress us with colors, clip art, and special effects, but not with content. As a sequence of information chunks, they easily create a feeling of tedious linearity, failing to reveal any memorable (hierarchical) organization of content. Slides are a difficult art. Nonetheless, few of us, I expect, would argue that PowerPoint is “making us stupid,” that we should not trust speakers who rely on it, and that slides should be replaced altogether by paper handouts. These surprising claims are part of the case made in a recent booklet (2003) by Edward Tufte, well-known authority on visual communication (1983, 1990, 1997). From a lesser-known author, such an extreme position might be disregarded with no more than a shrug. From the man whose first book was dubbed “a visual Strunk and White” by the Boston globe, however, it deserves careful analysis—and a careful response. At first reading, perhaps the most serious blow to the booklet’s credibility is its dogmatic, judgmental, often sarcastic tone. The abundance of words such as stupid, lousy, and atrocious make the 28 pages sound unscientific to say the least, and the ridiculing of Stalin-era military parades—or of school plays, for that matter—may strike readers as simply out of place. Admittedly, tone may be a largely subjective matter. Of greater concern than tone are the severe shortcomings of logic: the lack of discrimination between oral and written communication; the confusion of the product (slides), the production tool (PowerPoint or other software application), and the projection tool; and—paradoxically— the poor statistical evidence in support of Tufte’s thesis. This article first reviews these three shortcomings, then summarizes the booklet’s well-taken points, before offering guidelines for effective slides, no matter the tool. These guidelines and some of the analysis are based on more than 150 in-depth discussions of slides I have conducted with engineers, scientists, executives, and other professionals at workshops.

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