e., by using the English language to create sentences. Certainly, using PowerPoint in a classroom setting on a daily or weekly basis tends to decrease a student's need to know how to write properly. Traditionally, a student was required to write a grammatically-correct paper/essay and then present it to his/her class by standing up front and reading it to their fellow students. When such a thing was done properly and when the essay was well-written, it contained words that created images in the minds of the listeners, thus allowing the free flow of abstract thinking. But with PowerPoint, all a student has to do is present pictures/images to their fellow students and allow these images to "tell the story" while the presenter reads perhaps a few written lines of description as support for the images. In this instance, one could say that PowerPoint is "evil" because it "dumbs down" the subject matter being presented instead of relaying information via the power of the written word.

Glenda Morgan, writing in "Is PowerPoint Evil?" offers a similar opinion to that of Edward Tufte, for she states that PowerPoint "gets in the way of the accurate presentation of information" (2003, Internet), a reference to a student presenting information and data via PowerPoint when he/she is not an expert on the subject being presented to a class and perhaps including pictures/images that are not relevant to the subject matter. Morgan...

Exactly what Morgan means by this is that PowerPoint relies much too heavily on pictures/images as opposed to the written word which when effectively communicated to a class creates abstract thoughts that can then be interpreted by the individual listener.
Lastly, Morgan makes it clear that PowerPoint "is about content and moving information, often in very redundant sorts of ways" (2003, Internet), meaning that Tufte's "slideware" is often guilty of presenting pictures/images that have been seen over and over again by the viewer as contrasted with the written word which can be presented in ways not familiar to most students. In the end, PowerPoint may be "evil" when it comes to decreasing and/or limiting a student's need to write effectively, but in some cases, it may be nothing more than "new age" support for the old saying, "A picture is worth a thousands words."

REFERENCES

Morgan, Glenda. (2003). "Is PowerPoint Evil?" Teaching with Technology Today. Internet.

Accessed June 14, 2009 from http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/articles/morgan2.htm.

Tufte, Edward. (2009). "PowerPoint is Evil." Wired. Internet. Accessed June 14, 2009

from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html.