Sour Pointers

August 7, 2009 by Jerry 

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Last week, in an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Speaking Truth to PowerPoint,” the writer, David Feith spent 12 paragraphs criticizing the software by citing what he calls “Sour Pointers,” one of them an academic and the other a retired military officer. Although Mr. Feith acknowledged that PowerPoint is a business tool (“America runs on PowerPoint,” he wrote) neither of his sources is a business person. To bolster these critics, Mr. Feith also cited graphics guru Edward Tufte, a well-known PowerPoint critic, who has called the application a “prankish conspiracy against evidence and thought.”

After all that and two brief paragraphs with references to tangential counter-arguments, Mr. Feith closed his article by concluding meekly, “perhaps all we can say is ‘next slide.’”

Try this conclusion, Mr. Feith: “Blame the penmanship, not the pen.”

(To read more about this conclusion, please see my prior post.)

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