You will be able to build slides that each carry one idea in a full-sentence headline.
Open almost any corporate deck and look at the slide titles. "Background." "Key findings." "Q3 performance." "Next steps." Each one names a topic. None of them tells you what to think about it. You have to read the bullet points underneath, work out the point yourself, and hope you got it right while the speaker carries on talking.
There is a better way to build slides, and it starts with the headline at the top of each one.
Make every slide headline a full sentence that states the slide's point. Not "Q3 performance" but "Q3 sales grew 8 percent, almost all from one new client." Not "Pilot results" but "Pilot hires were picking on their own two weeks sooner."
You made the same move with your core message in lesson 1.1, Say one thing your audience will remember, and now you make it on every slide. Where a topic only labels the slide, a sentence with a claim tells the audience what the slide is for before they look at anything else on it.
The test is simple. Read only the headlines of your deck, in order, as if they were paragraphs of a short memo. If someone who missed the talk could follow the argument from those sentences alone, the headlines are doing their job. If the headline read-through sounds like a table of contents, they are not.
Wei Ling's original deck had headlines like "Current state", "Pilot overview" and "Costs". Her rewrite read: "New hires spend four days in a classroom before touching 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, using the licence we already pay for." "We should run a six-month trial at Tuas from July." Read one after another, those five sentences are the talk.
Headline sentences are longer than topic labels, so keep them tight. Most can be said in under fifteen words. If a headline needs two lines on the slide, the slide may be trying to make two points.
Once the headline states the point, the rest of the slide has one job: to show the evidence for it. That might be a chart, a photo, a diagram, a short quote, or a few words. It should not be a paragraph that repeats the headline at length.
Wei Ling's slide headed "New hires spend four days in a classroom before touching a pallet" showed one photo of an empty training room with rows of chairs, and a small caption with the schedule. Her slide on picking speed showed one simple chart of the two figures. Lesson 4.2, Charts that show one thing, covers how to build that kind of chart.
Ask of every element on the slide: does this support the headline? If not, it belongs on another slide, in the handout, or nowhere.
Most people read faster than anyone speaks. So when a slide is full of text and the speaker reads it aloud, the audience reaches the bottom first and then has nothing to do, so some go back over it while others drift to their phones, and in both cases they have stopped listening to you.
Your words and the slide should do different jobs. The slide shows the evidence. You explain it, add the example, tell the story and make the link to the next point. If what you say and what the slide says are the same words, one of them is redundant, and it is usually you.
Arjun learned this in his first presentation, the one in his story bank from lesson 3.4, Build a bank of stories from your own work. He read every slide word for word, and afterwards his manager pointed out, kindly but accurately, that she could have read the whole deck at her desk in five minutes.
There is a common belief that fewer slides means a shorter, tighter talk. Often it means crowded slides that try to carry three points each. A ten-minute talk with twenty simple slides can feel faster and clearer than one with six dense ones, because each slide is quick to take in and the audience always knows which point you are on.
So when a slide has two ideas, split it into two slides, each with its own headline. When a chart and a list are fighting for space, give each its own slide. Clicking forward costs you nothing, while a crowded slide costs the audience their attention.
This is a guide, not a rule to obey blindly. Some meetings run on a few slides that everyone keeps on screen and discusses, such as a single page of options. But for a talk where you are leading the audience through an argument, err towards more slides with less on each.
When you build a deck, write all the headlines first, before you add anything else. Lesson 4.5, Build the deck for your talk, walks through the full process. For now, a smaller version: take a deck you already have and look at its headlines with fresh eyes. The activity asks you to rewrite ten of them as full sentences, each one saying what its slide shows.
Rewrite the headlines of ten slides from a recent deck as full sentences stating each slide's point.
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