You will be able to produce short slide text and fuller speaker notes from the same source material.
Kavitha is putting together a deck on competitor pricing and on how far ahead their clients book sessions. One of the slides has the headline "Two of our three closest competitors still price per session."
A familiar bad presentation looks like this. Every slide is a wall of text and the presenter reads it out. The audience reads faster than the presenter speaks, so they finish first and then wait with nothing to look at while the presenter gets to the end of the sentence.
The cause is usually not laziness. Presenters put everything on the slide so they won't forget any of it, and the slide turns into their notes. You can fix this by giving the two jobs to two places. Slide text is what the audience needs to see. Speaker notes are what the presenter needs to say: the full explanation, which only the presenter reads. An assistant can draft both from the same material.
Begin with your storyline of sentence headlines from lesson 6.1, "Get the storyline right before any slides". Each headline states the point of its slide, which makes it the most important text on that slide. Anything else on the slide is there to support it.
The support usually takes very little room. It could be a few words the audience needs in front of them, such as three options to compare, a short client quote or one number that matters. It could be a single chart showing the evidence, and it is rarely more than that. When a slide needs a paragraph before it makes sense, the headline is probably carrying two points, so split it into two slides.
Put the limits into your prompt. For each headline, ask for the slide text the audience sees, at most fifteen words or one chart described in a sentence, and tell the assistant not to repeat the headline. When the draft arrives, read each slide next to its headline, ask whether every word earns its place, and cut the words that don't support the point the headline makes.
The notes carry everything the slide leaves out: the context, your reasoning, the example that makes the point land and any caveat you want to mention. You are the only person who reads them, so they can be as complete as you need.
Ask the assistant to write the notes the way you would say them aloud, in short spoken sentences, and tell it you don't want them in report style. If you have a voice guide from lesson 3.1, paste it in. If you don't, describe how you talk in a meeting. Ask for roughly 80 to 150 words of notes per slide, about one minute of talking, and adjust the amount to suit your time slot.
Kavitha's notes for the pricing slide are in their own speaking voice, something like: "I was surprised by this one. I'd expected everyone to have moved to subscriptions. So I pulled the rate cards, and two of the three still price per session. Their published prices haven't changed in two years." Written in report style, the same point would come out as "Analysis indicates a continued preference for per-session pricing among competitors." Kavitha's version sounds like a person telling you about a surprise they found in their own research, while the report version is an impersonal sentence.
For every slide, ask the assistant to suggest a visual, such as a chart type, a simple diagram, a comparison table or one large number, along with a reason it fits the headline's point. This works better than stock photos. A picture of people shaking hands supports no point, whereas a bar chart comparing three competitors' prices supports one specific point.
Expect some suggestions to miss. You still get a starting idea tied to each slide's message, and you can accept it, change it or replace it. Kavitha accepts most of the suggestions. For the slide about clients booking a year ahead, the assistant proposes a line chart of booking lead times. Kavitha uses a single number in large type instead, the share of last year's bookings made more than six months ahead, because the line chart showed more detail than the point needed.
People often skip this step, and it matters more than any of the others. Your material is reworded at every stage, from notes to storyline to slide to speaker notes, and a figure can change at each one. Figures usually drift in these ways:
percentages get rounded qualifiers like "up to" disappear a number from one year gets attached to a different year two figures from different sources swap places
The assistant won't flag any of these changes. When the drafts are finished, check every number, date and name on every slide and in every note against the source, whether that is your research brief, your spreadsheet or the original report. For a short deck this takes about ten minutes. Keep the source open in front of you while you check, and don't work from memory, because a figure that has drifted slightly is the kind of mistake memory lets through.
Kavitha's check turns up two changes in the draft. An industry survey figure has been rounded up by two percentage points, and the year of one competitor's price change has shifted by one. Kavitha corrects both before anyone else sees the deck. Doing this check is how you get a presentation people trust. Without it, people tend to quietly double-check your figures after you leave.
Take your storyline from lesson 6.1 and produce the slide text and notes for it. Then read the notes for three of the slides out loud and listen for anything you would never actually say.
Produce slide text and speaker notes for your storyline, then read the notes aloud for three slides and fix anything that does not sound like you.
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