Wednesday, April 4, 2007

The Bullet Pointing of America...

Dr. Dugmore said (quote): “I think we’re now in a bullet-point society. We’re not a paragraph society or a conversation society. I think we’re used to reading bullet-points, we’re used to speaking in bullet-points – and we’re losing out on human interaction.” Bullet-points are, of course, those terse facts, bluntly listed, with a big, black dot in front of each. Although useful on web pages or in memos, bullet-points are probably a symptom of disconnection – each fact being disconnected from its adjacent facts, and all of these isolated facts lacking a human face. Bullet-points make no attempt at showing logical or human connections. Perhaps Dr Dugmore is right – perhaps we are now verbal machine guns spraying bullet-points at each other: perhaps we have become a bullet-point society.


To the above I cry horse pucky. Here is why (in bullet points, of course):

  • Just like a baseball pitcher, its all in the delivery. it will make the person communicating a better writer because they will want to emote a certain feel for an email, PowerPoint, etc.
  • When I am sending messages I want to get to the point. No one has enough time in the day. When I am sitting in a meeting and an associate is standing on his/her proverbial soapbox going off on some diatribe about something that could be summed up in 10 words.
  • What Dr. Dugmore should be addressing in the above is "diarrhea of the mouth syndrome". Business is full of egos, the challenge is managing said egos.
  • Brevity- Treat every correspondence like you are on a Blackberry with a tiny keyboard. Blackberry's were not created for those looking to type a manifesto.



    Directness: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

  • 1 comment:

    Anonymous said...

    So true! This had me chuckling!