(SURE NUFF, the print MISC is delayed still, this time not of our making. Some outlets should get it by Friday.)

Regular readers of this space know we love bullet lists, outlines, and the other trappings of precision humor. Some persons, however, still apparently believe “real writing” hasta be obtuse & obfuscatin’. Even daily-paper writers, who must state their premises clearly, occasionally fall under this delusion.

That’s the best reasoning I could figure for a recent Chicago Tribune gripe-piece ragging about PowerPoint presentations. Writer Julia Keller claims they’re ruining the art of argumentative discussion, by turning every topic into a rigid sequence of oversimplified “talking points” and preventing impromptu exchanges among speakers and audiences.

In real life, those sins are only committed when the presenters are either:

• unsure of themselves in public,
• unsure of themselves with a particular audience (say, bosses or customers), or
• intellectually lazy.

The article includes several facetious examples of famous speeches reduced to easily-digestible PowerPoint lists. (Here’s another, visualized in presentation-slide format.) Go ahead and have a quick laugh, but then take another look. These gag translations actually reveal the soundness of the original authors’ arguments and the clarity of their thinking. Far from destroying the magic of the original speeches, these latter-day outlines could be useful tools for teaching modern-day folks how to think, write, and speak with similar clarity.

Keller also seems to claim outline-based presentations are incapable of expressing complex ideas. Bunk. Any good Hegelian knows any expressive or instructive statement flows from a sequence of hypotheses, antitheses, and syntheses. Details follow from sound structures, as much as any soundly-constructed building starts with a solid foundation and a sturdy frame.

Here’s a particularly beautifully written example: A 1930 manual published by RCA, intended to teach movie-theater projectionists how to properly exhibit those newfangled talking pictures.

The 211-page document travels a vast path from the laboratory basics of sound and electricity, to the procedures of operating the crude ealry theater sound equipment, to advanced lessons in maintenance and troubleshooting. But it remains thoroughly readable and comprehensible, because its clear copywriting arises from a clear structure. All “technical writing” worthy of the name exhibits these traits—and so do the most effective philosophical, argumentative, persuasive, and political writings.

When properly used, tools such as PowerPoint can help an author or presenter create clear structures. Some of the people these tools are helping are people who weren’t previously familiar with these principles, or with the general basics of writing and public speaking. PowerPoint is helping these rank amateurs become at least semi-adept amateurs. Some of their resulting works will feature less-than-Shakespearean elequence. But they can, with a modicum of creative discipline, effectively say what the speaker-presenter wants to say.

So don’t be another tech-bashing fogey, like so many culture-critics and newspaper essayists unfortunately are. If you don’t need software assistance to help organize your thoughts, you don’t have to knock those who do.

Besides, the PC-based “slide” lecture is another great addition to our collection of late-20th-early-21st-century literary forms. (Some others: FAQ lists, video-game hint sheets, e-mail investment scam solicitations, filmmaking storyboards, self-help quizzes, affirmation tapes, and shopping-channel spiels.) All of these vocabularies and more are just waiting for some clever writers to relaunch as more or less serious storytelling techniques.