Understanding PowerPoint Through Rhetoric

PowerPoint has been described by critics and proponents alike as ubiquitous. This tool, created primarily for the business world, is now found everywhere from elementary school classes to the highest levels of government. Critics of PowerPoint, like Edward Tufte, charge the software with such crimes as the corruption of data and changing the way that people think. Meanwhile, PowerPoint proponents such as Cliff Atkinson and Richard E. Mayer assert PowerPoint's value as an excellent tool that, if designed properly, can take advantage of the promise of research into multimedia theory. Even as we reconcile these diverse views within a larger Aristotelian framework of persuasive oratory, the PowerPoint files themselves have found new life and longevity as visual orphans, without their oral narrative. For example, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) and the Return to Flight Task Group have both noted in their reports that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has and continues to use PowerPoint slides sans presenter in the place of formal technical reports, despite the condemnation of both committees. In George Bockosh's PowerPoint presentation, "Issues in U.S. Mining," published in the Environmental Protection Agency's 2003 report Prevention and Remediation Issues in Selected Industrial Sectors: Non-Ferrous Mining, the message and technical data undergo a rhetorical transformation that affects its appeals to ethos, its enthymemes, and ultimately causes a simplification of the message by stripping away uncertainty and complexity from information.