Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint wasn’t quite what I thought: an instruction on how to create better PP slides. Rather, it’s a broadside at slideware, arguing in favor of paper handouts, which have far greater resolution and therefore allow the narratives that the likes of Powerpoint disable.

The part I liked best was where he says that the “metaphor behind the PP cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics).”

Instead, he writes, a better metaphor would be “good teaching. […] The core ideas of teaching – explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism – are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach.” I like this.

So, you’ll have to turn to other places for help in delivering better talks than the PowerPoint AutoContent Wizard – probably books or courses on rhetoric and teaching. Tufte writes: “Presentations largely stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. The way to make big improvements in a presentation is to get better content.”