Metadata
- Author: Edward R. Tufte
- Full Title:: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Priority,
- URL:: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/362558276
- Read date:: 2025-09-13
Highlights
PP slides are very low resolution compared to paper, most computer screens, and the immense visual capacities of the human eye-brain system. With little information per slide, many many slides are needed. (View Highlight)
Information stacked in time makes it diYcult to understand context and evaluate relationships (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-14
impoverished space encourages imprecise statements, slogans, abrupt and thinly-argued claims. (View Highlight)
Paper handouts for talks will help provide a permanent record for review (View Highlight)
The metaphor of PowerPoint is the software corporation itself. To describe a software house is to describe the PP cognitive style: a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deep hierarchical structures, relentlessly sequential, nested, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (advocacy not analysis, more style than substance, misdirection, slogan thinking, fast pace, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics). That the PP cognitive style mimics a software house exemplifies Conway’s Law (View Highlight)
The pushy PP style tends to set up a dominance relationship between speaker and audience, as the speaker makes power points with hierarchical bullets to passive followers (View Highlight)
In their report, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (caib) found that the distinctive cognitive style of PowerPoint interacted with the biases and hierarchical filtering of the bureaucracy during the crucial period when the spacecraft was damaged but still functioning: (View Highlight)
The choice of headings, arrangement of information, and size of bullets on the key chart served to highlight what management already believed. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-15
The closure packages showed an organization that apparently still believes PowerPoint presentations adequately explain work and document accomplishments (View Highlight)