You will be able to build slides that each carry one idea, stated in a full-sentence headline.
Most slide titles in corporate decks name a subject: "Background", "Key findings", "Q3 performance", "Next steps". A title like that says which area the slide covers and leaves the audience to decide what it means. People in the room scan the bullets, piece the point together on their own and hope their reading matches yours, all while the speaker keeps talking.
A slide title that names a subject and stops there is a topic label. Replace each one with a headline, which is a full sentence at the top of the slide stating the point that slide makes. "Q3 performance" turns into "Q3 sales grew 8 percent, almost all from one new client" (an invented example). "Pilot results" turns into "Pilot hires were picking on their own two weeks sooner" (also invented).
In Lesson 1.1, Say one thing your audience will remember, you turned your core message into a stated point. Here you do the same thing for each slide. A label only tells people which subject they are looking at. A sentence that makes a claim tells them what the slide is for before they look at the chart or the photo.
Wei Ling (an invented example) wanted her company to train new warehouse picking hires online. Her first draft used "Current state", "Pilot overview" and "Costs" as titles. Her second draft used five sentences instead, and read one after another they make up her entire talk:
New hires spend four days in a classroom before they touch a pallet. In the pilot, online training cut that to one day plus floor shadowing. Pilot hires were picking on their own about two weeks sooner. The online modules cost nothing extra to run, since they use the licence the company already pays for. The company should run a six-month trial at Tuas from July.
Sentences take more room than labels, so keep yours lean. You can say most headlines in under fifteen words. If a headline spills onto a second line on the slide, check whether that slide is carrying two points at once.
To do a headline read-through, ignore everything below the titles and read the headlines from first to last as though they were the paragraphs of a short memo. Picture giving that memo to a colleague who missed the talk. If they could follow your argument from those sentences alone, the headlines are working. If the memo reads like a table of contents, some headlines are still naming topics, and those are the ones to rewrite as claims.
Once the point is stated at the top, the rest of the slide has one task: show the evidence for that point. The evidence might be a chart, a photo, a diagram, a short quote or a few words. A paragraph that repeats the headline at greater length does not count as evidence.
Wei Ling's slide about the four days in a classroom carried one photo of an empty training room with rows of chairs, with a small caption giving the schedule. Her picking-speed slide carried one simple chart comparing the two figures. Lesson 4.2, Charts that show one thing, shows you how to build a chart like hers.
Before you finish a slide, go through every element on it and ask whether it supports the headline. Anything that fails moves to another slide, goes into the handout, or comes out of the deck altogether.
Most people read faster than anyone speaks. If you put a slide full of text on screen and read it aloud, the audience gets to the last line well before you do and is left waiting with nothing to do. Some go back and reread the slide and some pick up their phones, and in both cases they are no longer listening to you.
Arjun's story bank, from Lesson 3.4, Build a bank of stories from your own work, includes his first presentation, in which he read every slide out word for word. His manager told him afterwards, kindly and accurately, that she could have read the whole deck at her desk in five minutes.
Split the work between you and the screen. The slide shows the evidence. You explain what it means, add the example, tell the story and link it to the next point. When your words and the slide's words are the same, one of the two is redundant, and it is usually the speaker.
Many people assume that fewer slides make a shorter, tighter talk. In practice that often produces crowded slides with three points on each. A ten-minute talk on twenty simple slides can feel quicker and clearer than the same talk on six dense ones, because the audience takes in each slide at a glance and always knows which point you are on.
If a slide holds two ideas, make it into two slides and give each its own headline. If a chart and a list are competing for space, put them on separate slides. Moving to the next slide costs you a click, while a crowded slide costs the audience their attention.
Use this as a guide and apply judgement. Some meetings work from a few slides left on screen for discussion, such as a single page of options. When your talk leads the audience through an argument, lean towards more slides with less on each.
When you start a new deck, write every headline before you add anything else to it. Lesson 4.5, Build the deck for your talk, takes you through the whole process. For practice, take a deck you already have and look at its headlines with fresh eyes, then rewrite ten of them as full sentences that each say what their slide shows.
Take ten slides from a recent deck and rewrite each headline as a full sentence that states the slide's point.
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