Edward Tufte has a famous essay on the Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, which should be required reading for anyone involved in communicating basically anything. I think Rand has already linked to this essay elsewhere, but I’ll link again just for emphasis. There’s an excellent, if a little technical, essay here which covers some similar issues in word processing (hat tip to an anonymous commenter on this post).
The author makes three points about WYSIWYG word processing:
- The author is distracted from the proper business of composing text,
in favor of making typographical choices in relation to which she may have
no expertise (“fiddling with fonts and margins” when she should be
concentrating on content). - The typesetting algorithm employed by WYSIWYG word processor
sacrifices quality to the speed required for the setting and resetting of
the user’s input in real time. The final product is greatly inferior to
that of a real typesetting program. - The user of a word processor is under a strong temptation to lose
sight of the logical structure of the text and to conflate this with
superficial typographical elements.
The technical communication tools we use direct our thinking about the problems we are working on into certain channels. Bad (or inappropriate) tools encourage bad thinking. Good tools make it easy to understand the semantic content of the communication. This is one of the reasons good tools are less popular than bad ones. Bad tools allow sloppy thinking to fly under the radar. Good ones make it harder to obfuscate, requiring a higher level of discipline and clarity of thought. It’s possible to be clear in PowerPoint and Word, just as it’s possible to say stupid things in LaTeX or ASCII. The thing that makes a tool good is what it makes easy (clarity) and what it makes hard (obfuscation).
The thing that is lost in many of these discussions of technical communication is that for the majority of users, ease of obfuscation is a feature, not a bug. Most people are average or below. They want to be able to pass off their work without subjecting it to excessive scrutiny. Tools which make this easy will always be more popular than tools which make it hard. The customer for the software is the person writing the BS, not the person reading it. The distractions of futzing with typesetting make it harder to focus on generating good content, but the flashiness of the presentation makes it easier to paper over the weakness of the content. It’s telling that the second of these “features” is more important than the first.
Having bitched about the problem, I feel I should offer some attempt at a solution. In this case I think it comes down to little more than requiring technical memoranda be written in ASCII or LaTeX (or some similar method that separates content generation from presentation – even HTML might work). Of course, this implies that the boss wants technical memoranda, which is the root of the problem in the first place. The technical tools are just a low-order symptom. Another approach (of which this post is a sample) is to try to propagate the meme that