| bullet-lists and powerpoint | | Date Created: Oct 13, 2006, 11:43 AM |
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OK, I don't rightly know what happened to the rest of this week. I blinked and suddenly it's Friday already and I haven't blogged anything since Monday.
For a project I've been writing, I've been thinking about bullet-point lists and realizing how very tired I am of them. What’s wrong with numbering the points? You know that when the list contains important information, one guy’s going to wind up having to count... “Take the ... um ... onetwothreefour ... fourth point on the bullet list, for instance...” and then there’s a pause while everyone else counts onetwothreefour and finally almost everyone is on the right point. If you don’t mind the appearance of there being priorities in the list, use numbers. If that suggestion worries you, use letters.
Here's my advice, for what it's worth: (1) use bullet-lists only when you want to suggest that there’s a mass of points backing you up and you don’t want the reader to think about the individual bits in terms of priorities or even as individual bits; and (2) have each bulletted item be only a few words, never more than a single line of text.
All this reminds me of Tufte's criticisms of PowerPoint. His booklet, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint is a classic, but his shorter article for WiReD, "PowerPoint is Evil" is still available online. Another nice article (despite some simple spelling failures), as critical but balanced, is Kjeldsen's "Rhetoric of PowerPoint" at seminar.com. |
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