Week 4

This author discussed PowerPoint. Here are three of his main points, and what I think of them:

1) Power point slides contain too many graphics and charts, which often misconstrue or misrepresent information. Moreover, the charts sometimes over-simplify the information, or they simply do not present it in the best way possible. I'm not sure what to think of this claim, not being an expert in graphs. But it seems like a reasonable claim to make. It seems like people would want to simplify graphs for powerpoint, because if you put something up on the screen with eighty different lines going in different directions, it might give people headaches. And you don't want to give your audience a headache, so you might try to simply the chart. I suppose this isn't a bad thing as long as you don't lose information, but the author suggests you do, in which case that seems like a bad idea.

2) Because of the small size and low resolution of PowerPoint slides, People often shorten information in order to fit it on PowerPoint. They mold the information to fit the PowerPoint, instead of the other way around. The author cited the example of a slide from a statistics class, which said simply "Correlation does not equal causation." He said that this was way too simple an explanation, but typical of powerpoint, as it tends to, as he says, shorten everything, "turning everything into a slogan or a sales pitch. I completely agree with this point. I do think that powerpoint oversimplifies everything. In fact, when I first learned about making powerpoint, they told us to simplify everything, because, they said, you don't want to overload people with information. This may be a good intention, but overall it seems like a bad idea. If the purpose of powerpoint is to convey information, and you're not accurately doing that, then powerpoint isn't doing it's job. And I for one have seen many a powerpoint show that has over-simplified or over-shortened a concept or scentence for the sake of not over-loading the slide. The worst is when the powerpoint text is so simple that you can't make out what you're supposed to be learning. For example, I took a class in Anatomy, and the teacher would use slides. She often had slides that said, for example, "Vegas Nerve" and then "Splits into two, enervates the muscle." Okay, I thought when I read that, what am I supposed to take from this?

3) The author also claimed that the bullet style outlining of PowerPoint ruins information and presentations. He says that it can over-complicate text or over-simplify it. He talked a lot about the complicated hierarchical structure of powerpoints, and how this is just too complicated. On this point, I disagree with him. I think that bullets can be really helpful for organizing information, for both the speaker and the audience. It's a really easy way to organize information, and it's a format that is instantly recognized by most people. It helps you see what is most important, and then what is most important after that, or it can help you see the sub-categories within a larger category. It can help you see how different parts fit together.