Tufte ignores a hallmark of PowerPoint presentations
Tufte’s article was at once amusing and a bit frustrating for me. Having sat through many PowerPoint presentations that would have made Tufte cringe (little data, unclear use of bullets, use of fragments rather than developed reasoning), I was buying his critique. In particular, the shortcomings of the medium seemed laid bare when Tufte provides a numerical analysis of the data in PowerPoint presentations. Just a hair above Pravda? You have to be kidding me.
At the same time, that statistic gave me pause. The comparison to a Soviet-era propaganda machine seemed over-the-top. And, looking at the other examples made me realize: These are all print examples. And, some of these examples (Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine) were rather rigorous and academic. I would argue that comparing PowerPoint to Nature is irrelevant at best and misleading at worst. For Tufte is ignoring two central elements to PowerPoint presentations: the speaker and what the speaker says.
At the outset, we can see some odd linguistic tricks Tufte uses to make his argument. In the second paragraph, Tufte writes: “this chapter provides evidence that compares PowerPoint with alternative methods of presenting information” (3). The emphasis is in the original, but let’s compare it to what Tufte has to say in the following paragraph: “The evidence indicates that PowerPoint, compared to other common presentation tools, reduces the analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence.” Tufte seems to be waffling between “presentation of information” and “presentation.” The former term seems quite generalized; the latter, in my understanding (and I’d guess I’m not alone), generally refers specifically to in-person, oral, speech-like information.
And here, of course, is the problem. Comparing Nature (or the New York Times, or emails (12), or technical reports (13)) to PowerPoint is a false equivalency. You will not be able to deliver the same sort of information through PowerPoint that you would through a technical paper.
And, in some instances, this seems to be Tufte’s point. For some situations, a technical report or an email conversation or a journal article from Nature is the correct medium. And, when dealing with critical technical issues such as whether a shuttle is flight-worthy, these more data-rich methods are probably the right media.
Sometimes, though, we need information delivered to a diverse audience, in person, and orally. And I don’t know whether we should throw out PowerPoint in these situations. Sure, many of Tufte’s critiques hold true. And his analysis of the structure behind PowerPoint itself is one I am sympathetic to. But, without an analysis of what is being said versus what is being shown on the screen, I don’t know how valuable this critique is. For instance, Tufte praises special parallelism. And certainly PowerPoint should take advantage of this. But, by leaving out what was (or was not) spoken during the presentation, we have no way of knowing whether presenters are creating other types of parallelism that might overcome some of the downfalls of individual slides.
Moreover, as we’ve seen in class, many of the best presenters create a synergy between the oral part of the presentation and the PowerPoint. Measuring either alone does not paint the full picture. Therefore, even some of Tufte’s suggestions are less impactful. What point is there in reimagining our slides if we have not considered yet how those slides interact with our speech.
Tufte claims to have amassed an “unbiased collection of 2,000 PP slides,” but I disagree. In choosing only to look at the text, Tufte has revealed himself as biased toward long-form, written material. A more thorough analysis of the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness—I’m no convert!) of PowerPoint would require looking at the full presentations, not simply the disembodied slides.