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

[tOM Trottier]

Karl,

- bullet points better than sentences
    - fast to read
    - can indent for grouping
- poor for arguments, great for info transfer
- use as headings for text explication
- use diagrams, tables for richer relationships

tOM

On 30 May 2005 at 15:16,
Karl Fast <karl.fast at pobox.com> wrote:

> 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/
> 
> ------------
> When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
> *Plain text, please; NO Attachments
> 
> IA 06 Summit.  Mark your calendar.  March 23-27, Vancouver, BC
> 
> 
> ________________________________________
> Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
> Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l



-- Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur --
   ,__@ 	tOM Trottier
 _-\_<, 	758 Albert St., Ottawa ON Canada  K1R 7V8
(*)/'(*)	N45.412 W75.714 	+1 613 231-6115
<a href="http://Abacurial.com">Abacurial Information Architecture</a>
     Q,  Q,
    </  </    	I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences
 (`-/---/-')	attending too much liberty than to those attending
~~@~~~~@~~~~~~	too small a degree of it.-Thomas Jefferson