tufte-meetings-and-documentslisted

# Smarter Presentations and Shorter Meetings ## Overview Chapter 8 of *Seeing With Fresh Eyes* (printed pp. 151–161) is the operational companion to Tufte's PowerPoint critique: it specifies the **meeting protocol** that replaces the deck. The protocol in one line: begin every nonfiction meeting with a real document and a silent study hall, then discuss — and finish early. The chapter supplies the time budgets, the presenter's playbook, the audience's obligations, a scaling method for large lectures, and a low-power variant (the Medical Concerns List) for when the meeting belongs to someone else. The theoretical spine is resolution: **spatial adjacency versus temporal stacking** (p. 154). A document puts the evidence adjacent in space, inside the reader's eyespan, under the reader's control; a deck stacks thin fragments in time, under the presenter's control. Which one you choose decides who navigates, who compares, and how long the meeting lasts. > Division of labor: `tufte-cognitive-style` owns the format critique — the ten deficiencies of slideware, the density tables, the Columbia case, and the *Beautiful Evidence* 4-pager spec. This skill owns the SWFE meeting protocol: how to actually run the room. The two Columbia investigation boards' condemnation of engineering-by-PowerPoint (recalled at SWFE p. 154, at Tufte's prompting) is covered there; the A3 handout instances here (pp. 150, 155) are SWFE's own worked examples, not restatements of the 4-pager. --- ## §1. Th