Power Corrupts Absolutely Analysis

Derek Putthoff
Dr. Eastman
English 1011
2 October 2013

PowerPoint In the passage, “PowerPoint s Evil Power Corrupts PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely,” by Edward R. Tufte, he makes very clear his opinion that PowerPoint is a very ineffective public speaking tool. His very first sentence creates a metaphor for us, PowerPoint is like a prescription drug that has promises of making us beautiful, but instead the drug only had side effects of stupidity, boring everyone, wasting time, and degraded credibility of communication (Tufte 538). From this very first sentence you can clearly see how he feels about the program PowerPoint, and slideware in general. Tufte effectively makes his point by explaining, PowerPoint presentations are ineffective
because, they present very little information per slide, it has a boring and pushy style, over the top colors and display, and its preprogramed data graphs are pointless (Tufte539). He uses lots of numbers and facts to persuade us that PowerPoint is an ineffective public speaking tool. One of his main points based on logos is each slide has little information (Tufte 539). He says, each slide typically shows 20 words in a school setting, 20 words is about 10 seconds of silent reading (Tufte 539). That’s only 30 seconds or so of reading for a week of school (Tufte 539). “Now with power points being so overused in the classroom”, Tufte says, ‘’Students would be better off if the schools simply shut down…’’ (539). With each slide having so little information many slides are needed to just slightly touch on a subject, thus your audience is relentlessly hit with an endless amount of slides (Tufte 539). Another play on Logos Tufte makes is with so many slides required in a PowerPoint presentation to convey a useful amount of information, the presentation is going to be boring. Most people will say they have never sat through a memorable PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint tries to combat this with making its slides any color and design you could possibly think of, in Microsoft’s hope all the color and designs will keep your audience captivated. However, Tufte explained if your content is boring, adding color and design to it will not make it exciting (540). An even worse effect comes from PowerPoint giving its users so many creative options, sometimes, PowerPoint users will go so far with color and design that their audience will be so distracted by the PowerPoint’s outlandish design that they are completely distracted from the information it is displaying. Something Tufte explains is, PowerPoint presentations try and somewhat assert its dominance over the audience (539).
It’s almost like a sales pitch as Tufte describes it (539). Tufte even says, “PowerPoints pushy style seeks to set up a speaker’s dominance over the audience” (Tufte 539). Even the name has an element of dominance over the audience (Tufte 539).
PowerPoint does this even future with its graphs. “Straightforward tables turn into a mess of color and wasted space…” says Tufte (539). “The data explodes into six separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the table” (Tufte 539). He states the information is almost made useless with all the color, encoded legends, and branding (Tufte 539). He even goes so far as to label the sample pictures of graphs on page 540 as, “BAD. PowerPoint chartjunk: smarmy, chaotic, incoherent” (Tufte 540). Tufte makes it clear how much he dislikes PowerPoint, he is even sounds emotional by the tone he is writing in. This play on pathos is another way he is persuading his of the evils of PowerPoint. His tone of voice is almost upset, his first few sentences are about being lied to and deceived. This upset tone of voice continues throughout the entire text. His tone is most prevalent in his quotes such as, “Particularly disturbing is the adoption of…”, “Everything is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs…” and, “one damn slide after another” (Tufte
539).
His audience are people who come into contact with PowerPoint regularly, this is mostly the age group 15 to about 50.
This is a big audience, because almost everyone comes into contact with PowerPoint about every day, if not multiple times a day. It’s used almost everywhere someone would have access to an computer, schools, businesses, offices, anywhere someone needs to display information to a group of people (539). He wants everyone that is exposed to PowerPoint to know if you are presenting a PowerPoint to someone, you are not respecting them, as his quote, “Respect your audience”, displays (Tufte540). However, a more specific audience he is trying to reach and display his opinions to would be teachers. He expressed how he felt about PowerPoints in schools, he felt they were almost always useless, so if teachers read this text, they might take another look at the effectiveness of PowerPoints and maybe even look for other alternatives. One of Tufte’s main goals of this text is to fix the problem of ineffective teaching in schools with
PowerPoint. Tufte makes the majority of his argument with logos, he uses lots of facts, logic, and numbers to convince us PowerPoint is not an effective speaking tool. His Pathos is in the form of his tone, very upset and even frustrated about how widely PowerPoint is being used. Even though he uses little Ethos, he makes a convincing argument. If a large sum of PowerPoint users were to read this, they would agree that PowerPoint has been over uses and might call for a worldwide product recall.

Work Cited
Tufte, Edward. “PowerPoint Is Evil PowerPoint Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.” The Call To Write. 6th. Ed. John Trimbur. Mason: Cengage Learning, 2014. 538-540. Print.