Axios is a news site founded by the founder of Politico, and it's famous for presenting the news in a short, bullet-pointed, and easily mockable format. However, I know all about that, so I wasn't very interested in today's New York Times feature about Axios. But I read it anyway, and I'm glad I did. It turns out that there are a lot of people who wish they could write more like Axios, and now there's software that does just that:
Axios HQ, which promises to teach corporate America how to trim the jargon, is separate from the newsroom. Companies pay about $10,000 for an annual contract and use the software to write team updates and sales notes, Mr. Zaslav said.
The software uses artificial intelligence to suggest editing and formatting to distill blocks of texts into shorter bullet points. Axios HQ also has analytics that show the clients whether employees opened the messages.
A year after its start, Axios HQ has 210 clients, from major companies like Delta Air Lines to state school systems to small start-ups, Mr. Zaslav said. He said it was aiming for 600 clients by the end of this year. The company has about 60 people working exclusively on Axios HQ.
Shazam! Software that teaches people to write more like a PowerPoint deck! I'm so old I can remember when PowerPoint-ese was considered the gravest degradation of the English language since garbage collectors became sanitation engineers.
But it makes sense. In the past few decades we've gone from magazines to blogs to Facebook posts to Twitter tweets. And all along, the technology behind this change has been driven by Silicon Valley true believers who pretend to hate PowerPoint decks but in fact can barely live without them. So why not just admit defeat and adopt the PowerPoint esthetic for all human communication?
POSTSCRIPT: Just as an aside, it's worth noting that this is hardly a brand new phenomenon. We've been told forever to "keep memos to a single page." Reader's Digest made a fortune by abridging famous novels. Every college student loves Cliffs Notes. Even the sainted Elements of Style is mostly advice about how to write shorter, punchier, prose.
Still. PowerPoint? Seriously?
We reached peak communication idiocy when people started writing dissertations on Twitter, broken into eight or 12 or 26 little numbered chunks which make it a laborious exercise to read the whole thing. But I'm sure it's more effective than old-fashioned long-form writing, because reasons.
Substack is bringing sexxy back.
It truly is the OnlyFans of journalism.
Because people can actually find it to read
You should visit a modern college classroom. Not only is it all Powerpoint but it whizzes by so fast that no one can reasonably take it in. Not that any of them are even trying. They're on social media all through class in the full expectation that all the Powerpoints will be made available to them through the college LMS. Why bother listening, asking questions, or even attending when you can just flip through it all the night before the exam, with your professor provided study guide in hand.
Four years to retirement and I'm not going to miss it at all.
That's, um, kinda hard to do in math class. Especially the ones that have a proof component.
Assumes anybody is in math classrooms. Everybody I knew that wasn’t actually going into a math career - ie a good 90+% of my classmates - didn’t bother doing any actual math. They simply would type it all into a fancy calculator or computer and get the answer… and outside of math departments, nobody ever asks for your proof. And this was 25 years ago… god knows what math any kids know now.
This was particularly awful in social sciences whenever statistics would be displayed. The computer said that X=4.2 at the specified 95% confidence level so therefore that’s what the answer was, with no idea how valid that might be or how the inputs affected the output. Computer always fit a line through the data, so never mind if the standard deviation was abnormally high or there were too many weird outliers.
I had a student lodge a formal protest about an exam once, on the grounds the answers to the questions couldn't be found in the lecture PP slides. This in a course with a prescribed textbook, a lengthy written study guide and an emphasis on critical thinking.
In my experience the Chinese absolutely adore PowerPoint. They call it “pee-pee-tee.”
Release the Pee Tape!
My favorite part of The Elements of Style is the section on unfortunate punctuation. The example used is my home town newspaper, formed from the merger of the Chattanooga News and the Chattanooga Free Press.
The Chattanooga News-Free Press.
Read that twice if you didn't get it.
At Ames Res. Ct. the little store at the cafeteria was Amesexchange.
I thought Robert Hanssen was the horny double agent. Aldrich Ames was a perv, too?
ISTM that PPT is just the standard outline to the same old tired five-paragraph essay format. Absolutely _nothing_ new here. Not even the deliberate hype to make it seem like this year's girl.
I worked in insurance for many years. By the time I retired, I knew that when I wrote an email, the person to whom it was addressed would just skim it. I started to put the items as bullet point. And even then they would just read and answer the first 3 questions. I didn't know I was using Axios-style. Now I am on the board of a community association, and as we work on projects, the same situation applies.
Just think: under El Jefe, the Presidential Daily Briefing took your colleague's email preference global.
Wow you’re lucky. I send emails now with everything important in the subject line, because managers above my direct supervisor never even open the emails anymore. They simply swipe through their inbox scanning the subjects.
I will edit your memos down for a mere $9000 a year, act now as I will only be taking 10 clients.
Setting aside the content I rather like the Axios format even if the "go deeper" reminds me of Starship Troopers
Sounds like NASA's 3 bullet points per slide.
Been there done that.
For non-fiction, I think it's a good trend. There are a lot of books out there that would be better as a series of longform essays, and a lot of essays that would be better as bullet points like Axios.
Lame, but I have to do it:
"There's no bullet points like Stalin's bullet points"
The definitive napalm strike by Tufte.
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/tufte-powerpoint.pdf
Checked out axios..
This is news, I guess.
https://www.axios.com/political-polarization-twitter-cable-news-ac9699c6-260d-4141-b511-5c7193566ea1.html
“Most people you meet in everyday life — at work, in the neighborhood — are decent and normal. Even nice. But hit Twitter or watch the news, and you'd think we were all nuts and nasty.
Why it matters: The rising power and prominence of the nation's loudest, meanest voices obscures what most of us personally experience: Most people are sane and generous — and too busy to tweet.
Reality check: It turns out, you're right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent.”
It’s hard to make money off people like that. They made an interesting observation but didn’t make any point as a result. We all know this because… we know we don’t tweet. It’s like a Kevin drum blog post. Except… he tweets. Which means he’s not friendly, busy, normal, or silent.
If they shovel your driveway but vote for fascists then they are not by definition, generous.
Filed to: Our Robot Future.
It is easy to dump on Power Point "style". The fact is however that for some situations bullet points and other graphic helps are appropriate and--if properly administered--facilitate things for readers.
Kevin likes to use graphs a lot; indeed he prefers subjects that are amenable to them. The arguments against bullet points* apply to those graphs in full. I for one still prefer graphs over text or even tables (at least for a first reading; the tables should still be accessible) and bullet points over long paragraphs in complex periods.
The goal of "style" (in non-fiction!) after all is to help the reader as much as feasible without dumbing down the content. Most people can only eat one mouth full at a time. Reading works similarly.
* The name "bullet point" is atrocious by the way; who came up with such a martial abomination? Some second-amendment idiot?
To put it another way, any given body of content has an optimized format for presenting it. Sometimes this optimized format is bullet points. Other times it is not. The problem is not the use of bullet points when they are appropriate, but the use of bullet points regardless of whether or not they are appropriate.
Do you have any specific examples of such? I'm hard-pressed to think of any that don't have sub-bullet points. The outline of that tired old five-paragraph essay format almost always goes deeper than I, II, II, IV. etc., even if it's only down to the second tier, I.1, and on.
Everything in its place, Kevin.
I have nothing to say about fiction, but I read a lot of non-fiction and most of it takes far too many words to make its point. Unsurprisingly it is "professional journalists" that are the worst offenders, and amateur authors (like our host) who do the best.
So much of professional writing incorporates
- saying the obvious
- repetition
- signaling (ie saying things that everyone agrees, but god forbid your disapproval of whatever is not down in writing)
- useless stylistic flourishes, and
- long detours on the journalist's life experiences, personal beliefs, responses to the ostensible subject of the article/book, and so on
If this nonsense is removed from internal communications and blog posts, we're all better off. If it could be removed from magazine articles and books, we might just usher in the new Utopia.
>This is great news.
>What's wrong with Powerpoint?
>I have the attention span of a gnat.
I see what you did there ... Good one!