The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, Second Edition

I laughed aloud, hooting with amusement at his hilarious analysis. You haven't lived until you've seen the wicked parody of the Gettysburg Address as a PP presentation, or the splendid Soviet cartoon. We've all sat through (ok, we've given) these dreadful presentations. Along with the humor are some solid suggestions for improving presentations, and communicating data more effectively.


To the (Power) Point   December 3, 2003
K. John (New York, NY United States)
40 out of 47 found this review helpful

Tufte's latest text is a short pamphlet on the cognitive style of PowerPoint, that is, how a rigidly hierarchical, perhaps Stalinist, piece of software shapes the thoughts of both the presenter and his or her audience. The results are not pretty.

He presents his case using real and fictional examples. An reimagnition of the Gettysburg Address as a deck demonstrates how the lapidary oratory of Lincoln can be rendered a hopeless mess. The results are as amusing as they are convincing.

More important is the use of NASA presentations on the Columbia disaster. Tufte illustrates how NASA's engineers and its vendors can turn critical information into a incomprehensible data junkyard. The consequences in this case illustrate the far reaching impact of the tool and its potentially tragic consequences.

After reading this very persuasive piece, it's clear to me exactly how PowerPoint can be misused to deceive, confuse, and bore. The problem in almost every case is the tool itself. PowerPoint forces its totalitarian nature on the user demanding that one "shape the facts to fit the deck" by oversimplifying and thoughtless structuring.

Ultimately, Tufte accepts that fact that PowerPoint is pervasive. He concludes by offering suggestions as to how to make the best of a bad situation. The design points alone are worth the price of the pamphlet.


Judge for yourself...   June 11, 2004
Blaine Lilly (Columbus, Ohio)
25 out of 35 found this review helpful

Reading the other reviews here, it seems clear that the folks who give this poor reviews are the same folks who love presentations with at least five colors, twenty fonts, and if possible two or three animations per slide.... I'll bet y'all just love that dancing paperclip too, don't you?

Tufte's critique of Powerpoint is just an extension of what he's been saying for years: cut the crap! The more subtle point he's making is that when we try to shoehorn complex ideas into Powerpoint's straitjacket, a lot of information gets squeezed out. His analysis of the slides used by NASA engineers to discuss the possible damage to Columbia's wing is dead on.

OK, maybe some of you business types are more interested in being entertained than in being informed. But you engineers out there: buy this short pamphlet and take it to heart, the man is telling us the truth. Simplify, simplify, simplify!!


An Audience Advocate   April 20, 2004
Craig L. Howe (Darien, CT United States)
25 out of 27 found this review helpful

Finally, an advocate for the audience. In this 28-page essay Edward R. Tufte concludes the convenience of PowerPoint comes at a cost to content and the audience.

Presentations succeed or fail based on their quality relevance and integrity of their content. At a minimum, the presentation format should not harm the content. Yet Tufte, a retired professor of design at Yale University, notes audiences absorb information at higher rates than those presented in the typical PowerPoint Presentation.

For serious presentations, he says, it is useful to replace PowerPoint sides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data, graphics and images. Presentations should reflect good teaching. Communicate core ideas with explanation, content and credible authority.

There is no question that PowerPoint is an aide to those presenters who are inept or extremely disorganized. These people should learn that if they cannot summarize their point in a single sentence. If not, they should do themselves and their audiences a favor by declining the invitation to speak.

For the rest, reliance on this software crutch gives the speaker a false sense of doing well and for audiences to pretend they are listening.

As Tufte concludes, this little dance punctuates the question, "Why are we having this meeting?"


Force feed this to your "management team"   January 14, 2007
Mick McAllister
17 out of 20 found this review helpful

I have a friend whose ten-year-old daughter is required to give Powerpoint "reports" in class. Even before I read this pamphlet, the idea of the public schools positioning rhetoric as a Microsoft product struck me as revolting. After reading Tufte's brilliant and accurate dissection of how Powerpoint forces us into a kind of imitation of thinking, I am horrified.

I work on the fringe of the tech world, and I've had more than one boss demand that I reduce a coherent argument to bulletpoints "so it can be understood." Well, Powerpoint is to persuasion as comic books are to fiction -- the audience that demands it is simply entrenched in its own illiteracy. Tufte demonstrates persuasively that the Challenger disaster may have been caused -- yes, caused -- by the fact that the engineers discussed the project in the diction of "presentations." It's a large claim, and Tufte has the posthumous support of Richard Feynmann to back him up. Feynmann pointed to the facts that created the disaster; Tufte finds the core of bad thinking that let those facts control events.

If you use Powerpoint, you should read this pamphlet, also available as a chapter of Tufte's book, Beautiful Evidence. No tool should be allowed to control the nature of discourse the way Powerpoint does, and certainly no tool concieved, created, and used, with such willful lack of imagination and ignorance of the nature of communication.