Nobody can read and listen at the same time
This is not an opinion about design taste. It is how attention works. The moment you put a paragraph on screen, the room starts reading it, and while they are reading they are not hearing you. You have just made yourself into background noise on your own slide.
Which explains the most common presentation habit in the world: you put everything on the slide so you will not forget it, then you read the slide out loud, and now everyone in the room is doing something they could have done alone at their desk in ninety seconds.
The slide is not your notes. The slide is what the audience looks at while you talk. Those are different documents with different jobs, and the fix for wanting your notes on screen is to put them in the speaker notes, which we cover in lesson five.
In plain English
- Assertion headline:
- A slide title that states the point, like Support tickets doubled in June, rather than labelling the topic, like Support Volume.
- Wall of text:
- A slide so full that the audience has to choose between reading it and listening to you.
- Build:
- Revealing parts of a slide one at a time so the room looks at the thing you are talking about.
One idea per slide
If a slide is trying to say two things, it is two slides. Slides are free. Attention is not.
The practical test: cover the slide and say out loud what it is for. If your answer contains an and, split it. Two clean slides shown for thirty seconds each land better than one crowded slide shown for a minute, even though the total time is identical.
Count your bullets. If a slide has more than four, it is either two slides or it is a document you should have emailed instead. Some of the best slides have no bullets at all: one sentence, one number, or one image.
Headlines that state the point
Change nothing else about your deck and this alone will improve it. Most slide titles are labels: Sales Overview, Customer Feedback, Next Steps. A label tells the audience which drawer they are looking in. It does not tell them what to think.
An assertion headline states the point of the slide in a sentence. "Sales Overview" becomes "Sales grew 12 percent, all of it from existing customers." Now the chart underneath is evidence for a claim rather than a puzzle to solve.
There is a bonus. If somebody flicks through your deck later without you in the room (and they will, because that is what happens to decks), assertion headlines mean the argument survives your absence.
Here are my slide titles and what each slide shows:
[Slide 1: title, what is on it]
[Slide 2: title, what is on it]
Rewrite each title as a full sentence stating the point of that slide,
under 10 words. No colons, no clever wordplay, plain language.
If a slide seems to be making two points, tell me and suggest a split.
Checkpoint
One idea per slide, and a title that states the point rather than naming the topic.
Where AI genuinely helps: compression
You know your subject, so you write in paragraphs. Turning a paragraph into a line that keeps the meaning is a specific skill and it is slow when you are close to the material. This is a job an AI assistant does very well, and it takes seconds.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Make this slide better: our customer retention has been declining over the past few quarters due to a combination of factors including slower support response times, increased competitor activity in the mid-market segment, and some product reliability issues in the mobile app.
Output
Slide Title: Customer Retention Challenges. Bullet 1: Declining retention over recent quarters. Bullet 2: Multiple contributing factors identified. Bullet 3: Support, competition and product issues.
It shortened the words and lost the information. Nobody can act on multiple contributing factors identified. The specifics were the whole value.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Turn this paragraph into one slide. Give me an assertion headline under 10 words that states the point, plus at most three bullets of four words each. Keep the specifics, cut the connective language. Paragraph: our customer retention has been declining over the past few quarters due to slower support response times, competitor activity in the mid-market, and reliability issues in the mobile app.
Output
Headline: Three things are driving retention down. Bullets: Support replies slower. Mid-market competitors circling. Mobile app crashes.
The headline makes a claim and the bullets are the evidence. It keeps every specific and removes only the words that were glue.
Turn this into one slide.
Assertion headline under 10 words that states the point.
At most 3 bullets, at most 5 words each.
Keep every specific number and name. Cut connective phrases like
in order to, it should be noted, a combination of factors.
PARAGRAPH:
[paste it]
Readable from the back
A slide that looks fine on your laptop can be unreadable on a projector in a bright room with somebody's head in the way. Two rules cover most of it.
Big type. If you have to shrink the font to make the text fit, the answer is less text, not smaller text. The shrinking font is a warning light, and people ignore it every day.
High contrast. Dark text on light background, or light on dark. Grey text on a pale photograph looks sophisticated on screen and disappears entirely from row six.
Never say the words: I know you cannot read this at the back. If you can predict that sentence, you can prevent it. Saying it out loud tells the room you knew the slide was broken and showed it anyway.
Here is the text content of my slides, one slide per block:
[paste your slide text]
For each slide tell me: is it one idea or more than one?
Does the title state a point or just label a topic?
How many words are on it, and which words could go?
Flag any slide that is really a document I should send instead.
Run that on a deck you already have. The first time is uncomfortable and it is the fastest lesson in this course.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4Why is a wall of text on a slide a problem?