Well, it's taken longer than I thought to get back in the blog saddle after my travels during the last few weeks, so here is a Macguffin to get the ball rolling again. According to the Los Angeles Times, PowerPoint can be moving. Their piece discusses Cliff Atkinson, who is in high demand for his ability to show people how to create PowerPoint presentations that are not boring. The main strategy is to focus on telling a story and to have some understanding of visual rhetoric:

Atkinson also employs a storyboard artist and a screenwriting coach to help him hit the right dramatic beats. Then he throws a little science in the mix; he has studied how the mind works when absorbing images and narration at the same time.

Research has shown, for example, that an audience learns better when it is not being exposed to duplicated information. Atkinson pet peeve No. 1: that whole reading from a slide thing — bad idea.

This all seems to make good sense; I'd also be curious to see this research, though intuitively I buy it. I also can't help but be struck by the irony that those best equiped to transform PowerPoint's potential as a storytelling or other communicative medium are often uninterested in working with PowerPoint because of its corporate baggage and potential to be poorly used. Writing teachers may want to take another look.