Absolute PowerPoint

            The story about Sarah Wyndham using PowerPoint that Parker begins his article with reflects our society’s move towards being a visual culture, where we understand things better by actually seeing them. Wyndham’s use of bullet points clearly breaks down the main points of the problem so her daughters actually listen. If speakers are to successfully communicate their intended message, they need to convey it in a manner that captures the attention of their audience. Wyndham realized this and used PowerPoint to grab her daughters’ attention to get them to do what she wanted.

Parker uses this story to show that PowerPoint can be a useful visual aid that helps make it easier for audiences to receive, understand, and retain messages. Parker makes a good argument, though, about the downside of PowerPoint. From the beginning of my high school career up to now, I have been using PowerPoint for most of my presentations for my classes. I do find, as Parker argues, that PowerPoint edits my ideas for my presentations. The phrase Bob Gaskins found with Parker about PowerPoint, “‘Allows the content-originator to control the presentation,’” is interesting (Parker 4). While people who make PowerPoint presentations have control over them, at the same time, their PowerPoint presentations control them by editing the ideas they would have used without PowerPoint.

This problem of editing Parker raises also reminds me of the Strand anthology and how a poem’s form can affect the way a poem is written. For example, with iambic pentameter, there can only be a certain number of syllables (ten) in a line, which restricts word choice and can change the ideas contained in the poem. Similarly, with PowerPoint, presenters have to be able to phrase their information in a way that fits with the pre-set slide layouts.

            I like the metaphors Parker suggests that be used for PowerPoint, especially when he says “PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes” (Parker 1). It shows how, just as audience members judge speakers on the way they dress, they also judge them on their PowerPoint presentations. As the way people dress sends a message about them, what they include in their PowerPoint also communicates something about them. I also like how Parker compares PowerPoint to “a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion…about the way we should think” (Parker 1). His personification of the program as someone with an opinion telling you how to do something makes me think of PowerPoint as being like another boss controlling the way you do your work. As PowerPoint “also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world,” it would be frustrating having to “report” to two different people (Parker 1). Despite the limitations of PowerPoint, it is still a useful tool at the disposal of presenters to help persuade their audiences.