[Sigia-l] Smackdown: Edward Tufte vs. Don Norman

[Karl Fast]

Let me restate my point, and my complaint.

There is a school of thought which says that bullet points are
better than sentences. So, to express an idea, you must reduce it to
a fragment of text; a snippet of a thought. After all, the thinking
goes, if an executive summary is good (which it is), then powerpoint
must be better. I am not against distilling complex ideas into brief
summaries, only against distilling them down too far. Bullets tend
to do that.

Or, perhaps I should have said:

  - bullets over sentences
  - text fragments
  - powerpoint better than exec summary
  - don't over-distill
  
Doesn't quite work, does it now?
 
Obviously, you need to communicate ideas in different ways. And
obviously, you need to present your ideas in various forms and with
varying degrees of detail depending on the audience and your goals.

So the scientific paper is distilled into an abstract, the report is
restated in an executive summary, and the novel is summed-up in the
book jacket. Sometimes you have to squeeze a hundred pages down to
five, sometimes down to a paragraph, and sometimes down to a twenty
second elevator pitch. Often you need to do all three; maybe more
than three.

Capturing the essential elements of a larger work in a clear and
concentrated form is not what bugs me. Indeed, this is an essential
practice. But in my story about the CEO who told me that I would not
have thought the problem through until I powerpointed it, the terse
restatement of my ideas was not my complaint. (I had written a ten
page document, which was a summary of more than a hundred and fifty
pages of work, for a project that would engage 4-6 people full time
for the next six months).

My complaint was that reducing an idea into bullets points is not
the same thing as reducing it into an abstract or an executive
summary. A well written abstract is more coherent, cogent, and
useful than a series of bullet points. A good executive summary,
even if just one page, is better than the powerpoint slides. 

To communicate complex ideas you need to boil them down, but that
doesn't mean you should boil the kettle dry.



-- 
Karl Fast
http://www.livingskies.com/