Tufte: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Last year I read a bunch of Edward Tufte books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Beautiful Evidence, and The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. I found them compelling and ended up writing You've Got To See This for the Gurock Blog.

In the intervening year I've found ways to incorporate aspects of what I learned into my work: I've tried hard to remove the junk from my figures and charts; I've noted that when we're talking about how to talk about our data, something like small multiples can help us to visualise more of it more easily; I've encouraged members of my team to think about the difference between exploring data in a tool such as Excel, and presenting data in a chart produced by Excel.

After that experience, I thought it might be interesting to review the notes I took as I went through the books (which I did, and it was). Then I thought it might also be useful to share them (which I'm doing, and you can judge).

This short set of posts contain the quotes I took from each book, presented in the order that I happened to read them. Themes recur across the series, but the quotes don't necessarily reflect that; instead they show something of what I felt was interesting to me in the context of what I'd already read, what I already knew, and what I was working on at the time.

Beautiful Evidence
Envisioning Information
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
Visual Explanations

All of the books are published by Graphics Press and available direct from the author at edwardtufte.com. Particular thanks go to Šime for the loans and the comments.

--00--

Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when the relevant evidence is shown adjacent in space within our eyespan. (p. 5)

Many true statements are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide, but this does not mean we should abbreviate the truth to make the words fit. It means we should find a better tool to make presentations.(p. 5)

How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide? (p. 12)

By using PP to report technical work, presenters quickly damage their credibility ... Both [reviews of NASA's investigations into Shuttle disasters] concluded that (1) PowerPoint is an inappropriate tool for engineering reports, presentations and documentation and (2) the technical report is superior to PP. (p. 14)

... the PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about 8 seconds of silent reading material. (p. 15)

This poverty of content has several sources. The PP design style, which uses about 40% to 60% of the space available on a slide to show unique content, with remaining space devoted to Phluff, bullets, frames, and branding. The slide projection of text, which requires very large type so the audience can see the words. Most importantly, presenters who don't have all that much to say (p. 15)

Sometimes PowerPoint's low resolution is said to promote a clarity of reading and thinking. Yet in visual reasoning, arts, typography, cartography, even sculpture, the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading ... meaning and reasoning are relentlessly contextual. Less is bore. (p. 16)

To make smarter presentations, try smarter tools. (p. 28)

PowerPoint promotes a cognitive style that disrupts and trivialises evidence. (p. 30)

Preparing a technical report requires deeper intellectual work than simply compiling a list of bullets on slides. Writing sentences forces presenters to be smarter. And presentations based on sentences makes consumers smarter as well. (p. 30)

Our evidence concerning PP's performance is relevant only to serious presentations, where the audience (1) needs to understand something, (2) to assess the credibility of the presenter. (p. 31)

Consumers of presentations might well be skeptical of speakers who rely on PowerPoint's cognitive style. It is possible that these speakers not evidence-oriented, and are serving up some PP Phluff to mask their lousy content ... (p. 31)
Image: Tufte

Comments

Anonymous said…

Hey- I usually use Microsoft PowerPoint tool for creating presentations. It is very easy to use. I read PowerPoint tutorials from this website- https://www.slideteam.net/blog. You can also explore it as well.

July 30, 2019 at 11:58 AM

Ujjwal Trivedi said…

Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.

October 2, 2020 at 6:42 AM

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