PP actively facilitates themaking of lightweight presentations.

Presentations largely stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance,and integrity of the content. The way to make big improvements ina presentation is to get better content.Designer formats will not salvage weak content. If your numbers areboring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or imagesare not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant.Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm to content.Yet again and again we have seen that the PP cognitive style routinelydisrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. PP presentations too oftenresemble the school play: very loud, very slow, and very simple.

Now and then the narrow bandwidth and relentless sequencing ofslides are said to be virtues, a claim justified by loose reference to GeorgeMiller's classic 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or MinusTwo." That essay reviews psychological experiments that discoveredpeople had a hard time remembering more than about 7 unrelated piecesof really dull data all at once. These studies on memorizing nonsensethen led some interface designers to conclude that only 7 items belongon a list or a slide, a conclusion that can only be reached by not readingMiller's paper. In fact the paper neither states nor implies rules for theamount of information to be shown in a presentation (except possibly forslides consisting of nonsense syllables that the audience must memorizeand repeat back to a psychologist). Indeed, the deep point of Miller's workis to suggest strategies, such as placing information within a context, thathelp extend the reach of memory beyond tiny clumps of data.

The best way to show the cancer data is the original table with its goodcomparative structure and reporting of standard errors.

parody:

The pushy PP style imposes itself on the audience and, at times, seeksto set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience.

prompts suspicions:

similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports

If PowerPoint is a corporate-mandated formatfor all engineering reports, then some competent scientifictypography (rather than the PP market-pitch style) isessential.

estival ofbureaucratic hyper-rationalism

reports

hen several sentences together in a row, a narrative, couldspell out the specific methods and processes by which the generic feel-good goals of mission statements might be achieved

However, we cannot extrapolatethat vision from the bullet list. The plan does not tell us how theseobjectives tie together and, in fact, many radically different strategiescould be represented by these three simple points.

By leaving out the narrative between the points, the bullet outlineignores and conceals the causal assumptions and analytic structure of thereasoning.

one damnslide after another.

attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch

usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corruptstatistical analysis.