Write the headline of every slide before you design any of them

It’s tempting to start a presentation in the slide program. You pick a layout, line up three boxes on slide four, and only later notice that you never decided what slide four is supposed to say. A colleague asks what the main point is, and the boxes get rearranged, then rearranged again.

Do the deciding in a plain text document instead, where changing your mind costs a few keystrokes. Write one full sentence per slide stating its point, then test the story by reading those sentences aloud. An AI assistant is quick at the first rough sequence from your notes; you decide what’s true and what goes.

By the end of today you’ll have the storyline of your next presentation in a text document, one tested headline per slide, before the slide program is even open. It works for a team update, a class, a pitch to a funder, a design review or a briefing for a director.

A label names a topic, a headline makes a point

Most slide titles are labels. They name the subject and leave the point to the speaker, so anyone who reads the slides later gets nothing. A headline states the point in a full sentence. For example, with made-up material:

• “Q3 results” becomes “Repeat orders fell in Q3 while new customers held steady.”
• “Onboarding survey” becomes “New hires found the onboarding course useful, and most said it runs too long.”
• “Project timeline” becomes “The office move can still finish in March if we order furniture this month.”
• “Funding request” becomes “A second van would let us serve the two towns on our waiting list.”

A label could sit on anyone’s deck. A headline belongs to yours, and someone in the room could disagree with it. Engineering educators at Penn State teach this as the assertion-evidence approach: a sentence headline stating the message, backed by visual evidence instead of bullets.

The prompt

Put everything you have in one document first: notes, findings, figures, the email that started it all. Rough is fine. If the material is confidential and you haven’t checked how your AI tool handles it, practice on made-up notes or a public report; Before you upload a client document lists what to look for.

Paste the notes into a new conversation and, below them in the same message, this prompt with the brackets filled in:

Above are my notes for a presentation.
Audience: [who they are and what they already know]
Length: [minutes], about [N] slides.
What I want them to do or decide afterward: [one sentence]

Write a storyline of [N] slides. For each slide give:
1. Headline: one full sentence, 15 words or fewer, stating the slide's point. No topic labels such as "Background" or "Results".
2. Evidence: what the slide must show to support the headline.
3. Source: where that evidence is in my notes, quoting a few words. If my notes don't contain it, write "needs data". Do not invent figures, names or examples.

Then flag any slide that repeats another, and list anything in my notes you left out.

Set the number of slides yourself. Left to itself, an assistant tends to give every note its own slide.

A worked example

Here is a made-up case: an operations lead preparing a ten-minute quarterly review for the site director. The notes:

Q3 notes (made up for this example)
- On-time dispatch 91%, Q2 was 94%. Most late orders in the August system update week.
- Picking errors 38 in Q3, 61 in Q2. New bin labels since July.
- Overtime up, mostly August.
- Two forklift drivers left in September. Replacements start November 4.
- Complaints about the same as Q2? Check with support.
- Want approval to trial a second shift for the December peak.

With six slides requested, the storyline could look like this (also made up, shortened to headlines and sources):

1. Picking errors dropped in Q3, but late dispatches rose in August
   Source: "Picking errors 38 in Q3, 61 in Q2", "On-time dispatch 91%"
2. Picking errors fell from 61 to 38 after the new bin labels went up
   Source: "38 in Q3, 61 in Q2. New bin labels since July"
3. Most late orders came in the week of the August system update
   Source: "August system update week"; weekly figures: needs data
4. Overtime rose in August to clear the backlog
   Source: "Overtime up, mostly August"; hours: needs data
5. Customer complaints held steady
   Source: needs data
6. A December second shift would cover the peak without extra overtime
   Source: "Want approval to trial a second shift"; forecast: needs data
Repeats: slide 1 summarizes slides 2 and 3.
Left out: two forklift drivers gone from September to November 4.

Read it the way you’d read a new colleague’s first draft. Slide 4 adds a cause the notes never gave: “to clear the backlog” is a guess that sounds like a fact. Slide 5 turns a question into a finding. Slide 6 promises “without extra overtime”, which nobody has calculated; the honest headline is the request itself, “We’re asking to trial a second shift for the December peak.” And the item the assistant left out belongs right there, because the driver gap is part of the reason for the trial.

That’s the usual pattern: confident sentences, with plausible support filling the gaps. Storylines also drift toward the generic; “Efficiency remains a key priority” could open any deck in any company. The source line catches most of it. Every headline points to something in your notes or says “needs data”, and a “needs data” slide gets its data before you build anything, or it leaves the deck.

Read only the headlines aloud

Copy the headlines alone into a new list. Read them aloud, top to bottom, at the pace you’d speak in the room. Reading aloud catches what silent reading forgives: the jump between two slides with nothing in between, and the sentence you can’t finish in one breath.

Then cut. If the story still holds without a headline, that slide goes, however good its chart would have looked; its evidence can live in a handout or a backup slide. Fixing the story now means retyping a few lines. Fixing it after the slides are built means redesigning them. When the last headline tells the audience what you want from them, the storyline is done.

One more pass before you build. Paste the final list back into the conversation with this:

You are [the audience, for example the site director]. Read these headlines in order.
Which one would you challenge first, and what exactly would you ask?

Prepare the answer on a backup slide or in your notes. If that question comes up in the room, you’ve already rehearsed it.

For a presentation you give every month with the same sections, you need the assistant only once. Save the final headline list as a template with blanks for the numbers and fill it in yourself next time.

Into the slide program

Each headline goes in a slide’s title box, word for word. Under it goes the evidence the storyline named, and nothing that doesn’t support that sentence. Put the source in the speaker notes, so “where is that number from?” has an answer at hand. If a headline wraps past two lines, shorten the sentence rather than the font.

Some slide programs can build the slides straight from an outline file, which saves the copying; the tutorial linked below shows how. Either way, time the build and compare it with what a deck usually costs you; that’s your own answer to whether the time on headlines paid off.

Try it today

Block an hour for the next presentation on your calendar, even a five-minute update. Gather your notes in one document, run the prompt and check every source against them. Mark the gaps “needs data”, cut what the story doesn’t need, and read the headlines aloud from start to finish. You’re done when a text document holds one sentence per slide, each with a source or “needs data”, and you can read the list aloud without stopping to explain.

When the presentation starts from a long report, Turn a long report into a ten-minute presentation takes a storyline like this one into a finished deck and checks every figure against the report. And if the deck has to persuade, to win a budget or a change in how the team works, and your headlines still come out flat, let the assistant interview you before you write them. Its questions bring out the specifics only you know.