by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
Mitt Romney's "Global Initiative For Value And Freedom" Powerpoint slide deck is truly awful, and fits well with his campaign that seems to be built around appearing to be President rather than functioning as President. I can't really say it much better than this myself. Powerpoint is the business version of the bumper sticker; designing presentations around a Powerpoint deck (rather than usuing a few slides to supplement your speech) isn't a very good idea. If you put slides up on a projector, everyone will spend time reading the slides and ignore your speech. Powerpoint's tendency to promote bulleted lists, sentence fragments, and chopped paragraphs makes it impossible to string together a series of related ideas. The amount of information on a single slide is usually incredibly low, on the order of a page in a second grade level learn-to-read book. This low level of information content means that Powerpoint decks have dozens of slides, which leads to audience whiplash by making it difficult to draw relationships between bits of knowledge on different slides. In short, the Romney campaign insults its audience by trying to whittle his "ideas" on the war on terror (which are heavy on complaints about bureaucracy and Bill Clinton, while ) into too small a space. In addition, Romney's deck in particular is totally useless when not presented alongside whatever speech it is to be given with, which is more or less the fundamental problem with using Powerpoint as the center of your presentation.
Check out the GettysburgAddress.ppt for a satirical look at result of this Powerpointmania.
