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
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
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