What to Put on a Presentation Slide

One message per slide, and the title carries it

Every slide gets exactly one message, and the title should state it as a claim: Retention drops after week six beats Results, because a reader who tunes out for one slide still absorbs the argument from the header. Assertion titles also discipline the deck - a slide whose title cannot complete the sentence this slide proves is usually two slides sharing one screen. The claim-first habit costs nothing and does the work of a third of your speaking time.

When two messages compete, split the slide rather than shrink the text. The count survives the exchange: growing a ten-minute deck from eight slides to eleven still fits the 60-75 seconds-per-slide math, and each survivor breathes. This is the same cutting logic the fifteen-minute presentation page applies at rehearsal, run earlier, where it is free - splitting a slide before the deck is built costs minutes, splitting it the night before costs coherence. Ten slides at eleven is still inside the band, which is why the split costs nothing and the shrunken font costs the back row.

The numbers at a glance

Slide ingredients and their rules of thumb — the range, and where each row actually shows up in coursework. Skim it first; the sections below explain why the range exists and which row applies to you.

Respect the text floor and the bullet ceiling

Keep body text at 24 points or larger and bullets to three or four per slide, each twelve words or fewer - a phrase, not a sentence. The floor exists because projectors, distance and lighting conspire against small text, and the ceiling exists because bullets are cues: their job is to remind the speaker and orient the listener, not to carry the argument. The prose belongs in speaker notes, where 80-120 words per slide carry the talk track.

The reading-speed math explains why walls of text fail: silent reading runs 230-280 words per minute while you speak at 130-150, so a text-heavy slide is finished being read long before you finish saying it. For the next forty seconds the audience is waiting on you with a document in front of them, and attention drifts to the next slide. Keep the slide slower than the room, and the room stays with your voice instead of racing ahead of it. The one-sentence summary is that a slide should be slower than the reader, not faster, and the font floor is how you enforce it.

Choose data and images that prove the point

One chart per slide, walked slowly: a figure needs 75-90 seconds to do its work - axis, pattern, exception - which is why data-heavy talks hold fewer slides than the count alone suggests. Label the takeaway on the chart itself, crop tables to the rows that matter, and never paste a screenshot of a twelve-row dataset: a table a projector cannot render is a document, and the audience will treat it as one. If two charts argue one point, they can share; four cannot.

Images earn their slide when they anchor the message: a large, relevant photograph or diagram held for a minute beats four decorative thumbnails. Academic settings punish decorative stock imagery more than designers admit, so hedge toward relevance - if the image does not help the claim, the claim should get the space. Describe each figure aloud as you walk it, because the audience cannot listen to you and study the chart at the same time without a guide.

Credit every borrowed thing on the slide

Anything the deck did not make - a chart redrawn from a study, a photograph, a statistic, a direct quote - gets a short source line at the bottom of the slide, and the full entries live on a references slide at the end. The slide line can be abbreviated; the references slide does the formal citation work. Graders who check decks look first at images and figures, because those are the items most often pasted without credit.

The full mechanics are their own topic: the how-to-cite-a-powerpoint page covers slide decks in APA and MLA, and the how-to-cite-an-image page handles the picture cases. Quotes on slides deserve one caution - a long quotation is even harder to absorb aloud than on paper, so quote the phrase and paraphrase the rest, keeping the borrowed share of the deck modest for the same 10-20 percent reasons essays cap quotations. A deck that is mostly other people's sentences is a reading, not a presentation, and the rubric treats it as one.

Test every slide with the three-second glance

The audit is cheap and brutal: show each slide to a classmate for three seconds, then ask what it said. If they cannot name the message, the slide is carrying too much or the title is labeling instead of claiming. Run the test before rehearsal, because slides that fail it are the ones that will bait you into reading them aloud - the failure the how-to-present-without-reading-slides page treats as a full topic. Run the audit out loud: slides that need a spoken paragraph to make sense are carrying two messages, and the earlier section already prescribed the split.

Consistent layout does silent work: an audience that stops re-learning each slide's geometry gives the difference back to attention, so pick one template and resist per-slide decoration. The presentation-slide-planner tool builds the deck from the outline - one slide per main point, plus title and close - which keeps the 8-10 content slide budget for a ten-minute talk honest. Longer slots scale the same way the fifteen-minute presentation page describes. What matters is that the count comes from the outline and the clock, not from how much text happened to fit on the screen at midnight.

The format check graders run before reading

Graders check mechanics first and content second — a two-minute scan that decides the paper's first impression. The list: correct font and size, double spacing throughout (no stray single-spaced paragraphs), one-inch margins, page numbers in the right corner, the required title-page fields, heading levels used consistently, and references formatted with hanging indents. Each item is trivial; missing two costs measurable points in most rubrics.

Do this scan on the exported PDF, not the working document — export quirks (shifted margins, dropped page numbers, orphaned headings) only appear there. The style switcher below shows the same source formatted in APA 7, MLA 9 and Chicago side by side, which is the fastest way to catch the format you've been half-remembering from the wrong course.