26. Blame the Penmanship, Not the Pen: Operator versus Machine Error

Edward Tufte is a virtual one-stop shop for all things graphical. He lectures, publishes, writes, and comments extensively on the design of data. One of his books, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has long been a standard on many business bookshelves. In 2003, Mr. Tufte published a widely distributed 32-page pamphlet called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, in which he contends that “PowerPoint routinely disrupts and trivializes content” and charges that the software’s templates “weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.”^F26.1

This charge is the equivalent of blaming the Montblanc pen company for illiteracy and illegibility.

Yes, most of the “trillion slides each year” that Mr. Tufte derides do indeed abuse PowerPoint’s functionalities, but it is the penmanship that is at fault, not the pen.

The equivalent of poor penmanship in presentations is when a user employs PowerPoint as both a document and a visual aid. This multitasking of two distinctly separate functions has become Standard Operating Procedure in business today, as ingrained as a religious ritual. In fact, the document function of PowerPoint has snowballed into multiple subsets, including send-aheads, leave-behinds, and speaker notes. The practice persists because, in the pressured world of business, multitasking and repurposing are equated with efficiency. But these shortcuts disrupt and trivialize the presentation as Mr. Tufte correctly observes. The extra information in presentations gives both presenter and audience too much to process, and in documents, gives the reader too little to process. A PowerPoint deck does not stand alone, and no decision maker will make a decision based on a slide show alone.

The correct role model for graphics exists 24/7 in television news programs. Anderson Cooper of CNN, Katie Couric of CBS, and Brian Williams of NBC provide the details for the stories they tell; the graphics that accompany them are simply illustrative headlines. Professional broadcasting organizations have sophisticated graphical capabilities far beyond those of PowerPoint, yet the images they show are there only as support for the newscaster.

For your presentation graphics, follow the correctly balanced role model you see on all those television news broadcasts. The newscasters tell the story, while the professional graphics that flit by over their shoulders are simply headlines. Emulate Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric, and Brian Williams when you present. Make your slides the headlines, while you provide the details. In the Show and Tell of Presentations, PowerPoint is for the show; you do the telling.

Consider bullets as headlines and your discussion as the body text. Consider numeric charts as trends and your narrative as an interpretation of the trends. Consider illustrations as talking points; you add illuminating examples. All the narrative flow and added value must come from you.

For the sake of your audiences, focus on the penmanship, not the pen.