Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint lobbies some legitimate criticisms. The medium of visual presentations has always been one that I have found difficult to approach, execute, or understand. I have routinely been confused by the formats, particularly the seemingly subjective aesthetic elements, which Tufte refers to as “Phluff” in reference to PowerPoint. Tufte scathingly criticizes much of the stylistic aspects of PowerPoint. I have always felt that a great deal of the effort put into manufacturing a PowerPoint is devoted to meaningless uses of templates, transitions and rules that limit content. The focus of this medium is on style that seems fundamentally flawed in delivering information. Tufte specifically critiques the inadequacy of PowerPoint in representing statistical graphs and data tables. Dense statistics deserve adequate representation that cannot be provided by a medium that limits the use of text. PowerPoint also necessitates the use of bullet points; virtually all that I have been taught about PowerPoint has stressed the need for conciseness and limited text. Any attempts to provide a dense body of information through text or images are fundamentally flawed in the medium of PowerPoint. The use of bulleted phrases and words rather than complete sentences might seem to condense information and cue the audience into the most important information. However, conciseness also eliminates a great deal of information, thereby sacrificing content (see Figure 1). The whole mission of the slideshow presentation is to provide the audience with the most important information, however I feel that in most cases it merely functions as a tool for the presenter to organize his or her thoughts and oversimplifies the information. Too often I have seen presenters looking at their own slides and I have been guilty of this myself. It is a medium I abhor and in short, Tufte provided evidence to ground my grievances against PowerPoint.

                                          Figure 1