Franck Frommer 
How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid 
The Faulty Causality, Sloppy Logic, Decontextualized Data, and Seductive Showmanship That Have Taken Over Our Thinking

With over 500 million users worldwide, Microsoft’s Power Point software has become the ubiquitous tool for nearly all forms of public presentation—in schools, government agencies, the military, and, of course, offices everywhere. In this revealing and powerfully argued book, author Franck Frommer shows us that Power Point’s celebrated ease and efficiency actually mask a profoundly disturbing but little-understood transformation in human communication.



Using fascinating examples (including the most famous Power Point presentation of all: Colin Powell’s indictment of Iraq before the United Nations), Frommer systematically deconstructs the slides, bulleted lists, and flashy graphics we all now take for granted. He shows how Power Point has promoted a new, slippery “grammar, ” where faulty causality, sloppy logic, decontextualized data, and seductive showmanship have replaced the traditional tools of persuasion and argument.




How Power Point Makes You Stupid includes a fascinating mini-history of Power Point’s emergence, as well as a sobering and surprising account of its reach into the most unsuspecting nooks of work, life, and education. For anyone concerned with the corruption of language, the dumbing-down of society, or the unchecked expansion of “efficiency” in our culture, here is a book that will become a rallying cry for turning the tide.

Über den Autor

Franck Frommer worked as a journalist for a dozen years before joining an international company where he worked in the area of communications and the web. The author of a biography of Jean-Patrick Manchette, he lives in Paris.
George Holoch has translated more than twenty books, including Eric Hazan’s
Notes on the Occupation and Alain Deneault’s
Offshore (both from The New Press). He lives in Hinesburg, Vermont.