Text Response 1

The article I chose to cover was "PowerPoint: Killer App?" by Ruth Marcus. This article asks whether PowerPoints make information dull, whether it makes it harder for people to understand what is being discussed. They also go as far to blame PowerPoint in the explosion of the space shuttle the Columbia. I agree to an extent on the point the author is giving, but I am also against what she is saying.

 I believe that power points can be boring and hard to understand, but you can fix that. You can draw your audiences attention into the presentation by not crowding a bunch of words on their in small print and making the background and more compliant with the coloring of the words. The author states that people blame PowerPoint for the explosion of the shuttle because analysts could not absorb everything on the powerpoint in regard to the shuttle. The problem was that there were tiles on the wings of the shuttle that could pose some problems, but were not detected due to the overload amount of information on the slides.

The author is correct in stating that PowerPoints can be boring and explaining that you can't get the full understanding and feel of what is being discussed. The author used and example in her article about Abraham Lincoln's speech, the Gettysburg Address. The author phrased the most popular parts of the speech, and when reading how the speech would have been prepared on a slide did not have the same impact as it would, when having it preached to you from someone of authority.

All in all I believe the author makes valid points in her argument and I agree with them to a degree. PowerPoints can cause some strife but its all in how you use it. Microsoft cannot be blamed for something like the space shuttles crash because what caused it was not covered well in a slide. That is the person who designed the slides problem and the engineers issues.