Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Peter Coffee in eWeek meditates on what PowerPoint is doing to us. He begins with Edward Tufte's piece on how PowerPoint misled the assessment of the risk to the shuttle Columbia. Peter writes:

Bad presentations result from people learning to write with a model of "topic sentence, body, conclusion," instead of a journalistic model of "lead (conclusion), significance, supporting details."

Peter says that although media "don't just transmit facts; they alter both selection and emphasis, creating different realities in the process," PowerPoint isn't solely to blame for the bad presentations done with it. In fact, he says, PowerPoint helps you communicate more effectively if you have something "useful" to say and exposes you as a ninny if you don't.

But the notion that there is a single right way to do a presentation, and it just happens to be the way journalists tell stories, is surely an overstatement. For example, dramatic narratives have been known to work as an organizing principle. Narratives work differently than standard journalistic articles. For one thing, while journalists begin with the conclusion, narratives think some conclusions can only be understood by watching how they unfold from the beginning. Hamlet written as a newspaper article might not work as well:

Carnage in the Court!

Elsinore — The castle was littered with bodies, including that of the King, Queen and the Prince, apparently as the result of a fencing match that got out of hand. Reports attributed the outburst alternatively to a conspiracy by Hamlet to avenge his father, a conspiracy by the King to put down a usurper, Ophelia's brother's desire to avenge her suicide, or bad fish.