On point or just sucked in?

June 27th, 2006

It's not always wise to get right to the point 

I'm a big believer in writing short. Don't let your sentences ramble on and on. Don't use $2 words when five cent words will do. That said, there is such a thing as too short. The Washington Post highlights this problem in a piece amusingly headlined PowerPoint, Killer App?

I must confess, this isn't a recent article. Although I discovered it just yesterday, the piece was written almost a year ago. Nor is its thesis entirely new. Yale political scientist Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of information, wrote a 2003 article for Wired magazine titled Power Point is Evil. And I recall reading an article of a similar theme in the New Yorker at least two years ago.

But the point bears repeating. Our writing needs images and metaphors. It also needs "connectors" -- that is, workaday words like "and" "or" "but" "moreover" -- that join our thoughts together. When the metaphors and connectors are sucked out -- as they are by the relentless bullet points of Power Point -- the beauty of language is not only squandered, but meaning is lost as well. The Washington Post article recounts how the space shuttle crash has been, in part, attributed to PowerPoint. 

...A PowerPoint slide [was] presented to NASA senior managers in January 2003, while the space shuttle Columbia was in the air and the agency was weighing the risk posed by tile damage to the shuttle wings. Key information was so buried and condensed in the rigid PowerPoint format as to be useless...

But perhaps the most persuasive argument is the way the article presents a retelling of the Gettysburg Address. If you've ever written a PowerPoint presentation, you'll have a guilty little "ping" of recognition as you read this one:

Review of Key Objectives & Critical Success Factors

• What makes nation unique

• Shared vision

For as long as the Washington Post keeps its pages current, you can read the whole article here.