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Edward Tufte Gives Presentation Advice

Edward Tufte’s passion is the graphical display of information. But his nemsis the visual lie. So naturally, he has a special dislike for PowerPoint. His poster on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint gave me this line, which I will likely find myself repeating at a time when it is both most accurate and most politically suicidal to do so:

Why are we having this meeting? The rate of information transfer is asymptotically approaching zero.

He’s working on a new book, Beautiful Evidence, and he’s posted a few chapters-in-progress: Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations. His list of suspects: bullet lists, quotes without context, lying graphs and charts.

So now I have to re-do my presentations. I do my best to avoid charts and graphs, but bulleted lists and pull quotes are a staple of mine. One of the commentors remarked that the criticism may be a little harsh:

Bullet points abbreviate by design and often they do give the what rather than the why; that’s because a good speaker should fill in the gaps. You say that an appropriate tool is the sentence; that is, hopefully, what the speaker will be using to communicate with their audience.

I imagine Tufte’s suggestion — based on his PowerPoint essay — would be to use them carefully, and shift emphasis to detail handouts that have more information (and fewer of the problems) of a PowerPoint slide. However, never ever hand out a printed PowerPoint presentation.

People see, read, and think all the time at intensities vastly greater than those presented in printed PowerPoint reports. …Report writers should have the courtesy to write a real report (which might also be handed out at a meeting) and address their readers as serious people.

In short, if you are compelled to use a projector during your presentation, at least don’t let it distort the content of the presentation. I look forward to the full release of Beautiful Evidence for more tips. Until then, I’ll have to re-read The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, and examine, as Tufte suggests, the third chapter of Visual Explanations.

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Posted January 25, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Books, Movies, Music. .

5 Comments

Pingback by MaisonBisson.com » Blog Archive » PowerPoint. Killer App? on September 15, 2005 9:46 am
[...] Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post wonders if PowerPoint is a killing app. She’s not the first to note that NASA administrators make decisions — sometimes fatal decisions — on the basis of PowerPoint presentations that mask or misrepresent details. I wrote about Edward Tufte’s Cognitive Style of PowerPoint essay in a previous post. Marcus doesn’t add to many new points, but the column is a sign that an anti-PowerPoint movement may be growing. Here are three paragraphs: [T]he insidious influence of PowerPoint goes beyond the way it frustrates scientific analysis. The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America — the PowerPointing of the planet, actually — is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese. [...]
Pingback by Joel Friesen’s Misuse of PowerPoint « MaisonBisson.com on January 6, 2006 1:26 pm
[...] Joel Friesen’s PowerPoint-esque presentation on why his girlfriend should continue to date him didn’t win her back, but it entertained folks. [...]
Pingback by Data Visualization and the OPAC « MaisonBisson.com on January 21, 2006 9:03 am
[...] A chat with Ryan Eby, also an Edward Tufte fan, elicited this line about another reason we continue to struggle with the design of our catalogs: data isn’t usable by itself if it was then the OPAC would just be marc displays [...]
Pingback by The URLs From My Portland Talk « MaisonBisson.com on June 6, 2006 11:55 am
[...] Following Edward Tufte’s advice, I’ve been wanting to offer a presentation without slides for a long time now. I finally got my chance in Portland. The downside is that now I don’t have anything to offer as a takeaway memory aid for my talk. My speaking notes are too abstract to offer for public consumption, but below are the URLs from them along with a tiny bit of context. [...]
Pingback by UC Berkeley Proud Of PowerPoint « MaisonBisson.com on March 11, 2007 12:42 am
[...] Byrne giving a talk titled â€œI â™¥ PowerPoint.â€ And, yes, they’re all perfectly aware of Edward Tuftem, the PowerPoint-related deaths, and funny stuff like [...]

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