Meaning first, slides second
Lesson 9 of 13 in the course “AI Images and Slides”. Free, with animations and a quiz.
The slide nobody heard
In 2003 the shuttle Columbia damaged its wing during launch. Boeing engineers made slides for NASA assessing the risk. Later Edward Tufte, a visualisation researcher, took one of them apart. The title sounded reassuring, and the most important fact was hidden in a small bullet at the bottom: the foam piece in the tests was about 640 times smaller than the one that hit the wing. The shuttle broke up on re-entry and seven astronauts died. The investigation board later specifically criticised the habit of settling serious questions with slides.
The outline before the design
Liya has to present a project in her marketing class: 10 slides about her candle shop. The most common mistake is to open a service straight away and hit “generate presentation”. You get something pretty and empty. First decide who’s listening and what one idea they should take away. Then ask AI to sketch an outline, and you edit it: cut the extra, reorder, add your own numbers. Design is the last step. The outline prompt is below.
The title is the takeaway
Michael Alley, a professor of engineering communication at Penn State, studies the “assertion-evidence” approach. A slide title isn’t a topic, it’s the takeaway as a full sentence. Below it is the evidence: a chart, a photo or a diagram, not a wall of bullets. Compare “Sales” with “Sales tripled after the videos”. In the second case the listener gets the point even if they drifted off. His studies with students show that material is understood and remembered better this way.
One idea per slide
When a slide has five ideas, people read instead of listening, and everyone loses. Slides are free: three simple ones beat one crowded one. If AI made a slide with a long list, ask it to split it: “split this into separate slides, one idea each, the title is the takeaway”. A good test: read only the titles in a row. If they tell the whole story, the structure works.
AI makes up numbers
Ask AI to “add statistics about the candle market” and it will happily give exact percentages. Some may be made up: the model writes plausible text rather than checking a database. One invented number at your presentation and trust in the whole talk is gone. The rule is simple: check every number against a source. Ask for a link, open it and find the number with your own eyes. Found it: put the link on the slide. Didn’t: delete it without mercy.
The skeleton of a talk
For a short defence or pitch, a simple five-step structure works. The problem the listener feels. Why it matters right now. The solution in one sentence. The proof: a number, an example or a review. And what the listener should do next. For Liya it goes like this: holiday gifts all look the same, demand for them grows in December, her candles with a name make a gift personal, here are customer reviews, and next is the link to the shop.
Check yourself
- Which slide title is better under the assertion-evidence approach?
Correct answer: “People buy them as gifts, not for themselves”. A takeaway title states the point at once, even if the listener drifted off. - AI added “the candle market grows 27% a year” to the slides. What now?
Correct answer: Find a source with that number or delete it. The model writes plausibly and may invent a number, so it needs checking against a source. - How can you quickly check a presentation’s structure?
Correct answer: Read only the titles in a row. If the titles tell the whole story, each slide does its job.