Saturday, June 28, 2008

Powerpointitis

Ever since the creation of PowerPoint, we see that documents and presentations continue to get longer. It is so easy to create a visually attractive presentation, but reduce the number of coherent words. The discipline of writing down your thoughts in a sequence of sentences is becoming rarer. Where would we be if Shakespeare had used PowerPoint, or Ernest Hemingway? Yet, were they poor communicators? Probably not. So while PowerPoint is a powerful tool, it can be used as crutch to attempt to disguise the weakness of the thinking. We need to avoid this or we will see a deterioration in communications rather than an improvement.

1 comment:

Jonathan said...

I dislike PowerPoint. Fortunately I'm not professionally required to use it, so I don't. I open it only reluctantly on those occasions when people such as my father-in-law send me cute presentations that they fondly hope I'll enjoy.