Writing with Powerpoint.

In order to communicate with an audience during a conference‟s talk or a lecture it is becoming increasingly popular to use a fragmented, simplified and shortened form of writing, through a presentation manager like PowerPoint (or Presenter, or Impress and so on). Such a form of writing concerns texts which generally are not self-sufficient and which will be integrated orally through expansions, comments, explanations, etc. by a presenter. These written texts might have two different forms and designs: one synthetic form for a synchronous face-to-face presentation, and one extended form for an asynchronous, stand-alone presentation (Gold, 2002; Farkas, 2006). Powerpoint (or ppt) became popular because it is considered a useful tool for communication. Audiences - and students in particular- appreciate it (Bartsch & Cobern, 2003; Blokzijl & Naeff, 2004), because it seems to facilitate and enhance comprehension during lecture listening, because it makes the selection of important ideas explicit, because it highlights hierarchies and connections between ideas, showing the outcome of the speaker re-processing of the material (Paoletti et al. 2008). The problem that I want to address is that, as a consequence of the program characteristics and of the well known designing guidelines and best practices suggestions (like the famous no more than 6 words x 6 rows), ppt might be very sketchy, schematic even when it is used asyncronically, without the oral integrations of the speaker, when it is read through some University platform or on a social software like Slideshare. Guidelines and even literature on the topic suggest that the written texts should be shorter –every point like a key-word - less cohesive and coherent than a normal text.