[Sigia-l] merits of bullets (was Smackdown: Edward Tufte vs. DonNorman)

[Listera]

Terence Nelan:

> A lazy, unskilled person will write a lousy 300-page report.
> A lazy, unskilled person will write lousy bullets.

I think we all agree with that.

What I want to stress is that for an audience like the proverbial CEO the
*format* of PPT bullets is an artificial constraint that immediately and far
more efficiently exposes the failure to think through. Most CEOs can sit
through a 5-min PPT presentation, but a very few will have the time to plod
through a 300-page report.

By itself, this fact may not be interesting. But if we consider how the
nature of 'content presentation' is changing, it becomes more relevant.

Today there's a continuum of delivery: headline > one-sentence description >
5-min presentation > abstract > summary > full-report, etc.

Even more difficult than writing bullets is writing headlines. In an
RSS-world, for example, you live and die by the headline and the
one-sentence description. So it's a *layered* presentation, shorter/more
distilled parts lead into longer/more detailed pieces.

Finally, those 'lazy, unskilled' people (who can't cover the full spectrum
of this new, layered presentation landscape) won't succeed. Their failure to
do so will be exposed and detected far faster, because audiences will have a
chance to see their subpar work earlier, in more condensed formats.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba