Let me make a seemingly obvious statement:
A presentation is a story told by a person to a room full of people.
That sentence should be straightforward. It is not.
If it were obvious, most presentations would not be walls of text projected onto a screen while a person stands next to them and reads aloud. They would not be documents pretending to be presentations. They would not be decks that work perfectly fine without anyone presenting them — which is another way of saying they do not need a presenter at all.
The job of a presentation is to tell a story. The slides help tell that story. They do not tell it for you. They do not narrate it. They do not replace you. They are a visual aid that supports the person in the room doing the actual work of communicating.
Think about the last fantasy novel you read. Somewhere in the front matter there was a map. A detailed rendering of the world. Cities, rivers, mountain ranges, political boundaries. That map existed so you could orient yourself while reading. You did not sit with the map open for the entire book. You looked at it once, early on, to understand the geography. Then you read the story.
A detailed explainer slide is that map. It has its place. Maybe once. Maybe to orient the audience before the real content starts. But if every slide in your deck is a map, you are not telling a story. You are giving a geography lesson. And your audience checked out ten minutes ago.
Nothing should get between you, your story, and your audience.
Where This Goes Wrong
The thesis is simple. The four most common slide offenses are bullet walls, text overload, the spreadsheet-on-a-slide, and the seven-concepts-crammed-onto-one-page slide. But those are symptoms. The real problem is three habits of thinking that produce them.
The teleprompter habit. The presenter writes down everything they plan to say, puts it on the slide, and reads it. The slide becomes a script. The audience reads faster than the presenter talks. Attention fractures.
Confusing thoroughness with clarity. The presenter worries the audience will miss something if the slide does not explain everything. So the slide explains everything. The presenter becomes redundant. The audience wonders why they are in a room when they could be reading a memo.
The leave-behind fallacy. And this one deserves its own section.
The Leave-Behind Fallacy
For decades, building a deck that could stand alone was not a bad practice. It was a necessary one.
Meetings happened in conference rooms. If you were not in that conference room, you missed the meeting. There was no recording. There was no transcript. The only artifact was the deck. So the deck had to serve two jobs: a visual aid for the people in the room, and a standalone document for the people who were not.
This was a reasonable constraint. It produced a predictable outcome. Decks got loaded with text because they had to function as documents.
Then meetings went virtual. But the same problem persisted. People still missed meetings. Time zones conflicted. So the deck still had to work as a leave-behind. The habit survived the shift to video calls because the underlying constraint had not changed.
But that constraint has changed. Fundamentally.
Meetings can be recorded with a single click. Full transcripts are auto-generated. AI can summarize an hour-long discussion into a page of notes in seconds. The person who missed the meeting no longer needs the deck to reconstruct what happened. The deck no longer has to carry the weight of being the only record of the conversation.
And yet, most people still build decks as if it does.
Garr Reynolds identified this exact problem years ago in Presentation Zen. He coined the term “slideument” for the slide-document hybrid — something that fails at both. His argument was straightforward: slides are slides, documents are documents, and the attempt to combine them serves neither the room nor the reader.
The leave-behind fallacy is not laziness. It is institutional memory from a world that no longer exists. If you need a standalone document, write a standalone document. But do not compromise every slide in a deck to solve a problem that a recording and a transcript already solve better.
See It or Hear It
Some things the audience needs to see. Labels. Statistics. A diagram that shows a relationship. A number that hits harder as a visual than spoken aloud.
Some things the audience needs to hear. Explanations. Context. The story behind the number. The “so what” that connects a feature to a business outcome.
When you put things the audience needs to hear onto the slide, you create competition. Richard Mayer’s research on multimedia learning found that people learn better from narration paired with graphics than from narration paired with graphics and on-screen text. Adding the text does not help. It hurts.
The test is simple: look at every piece of text on a slide and ask: if I removed this and just said it, would the slide still work? If yes, the text belongs in your notes. Not on the slide.
Here is the difference.
On the slide: “We didn’t pivot to meet this moment. We were already here.”
That works. It is a position statement. It lands harder when the audience reads it while the presenter delivers it. Remove it from the slide and just say it and you lose something.
On the slide: “Some organizations operate under mandates that restrict where data can be processed or stored.”
That is an explanation. It is setup. It is what you say while the slide shows a label that reads “Data Sovereignty” and maybe a map. Putting that sentence on the slide turns the presenter into a narrator of their own content.
Speaker Notes Are the Presentation
If the slides are not the presentation, where does the presentation live?
In the speaker notes.
I use a three-part structure for every slide:
On This Slide. What is here and why. Not a content recap — the strategic purpose. Why this slide exists at this point in the story.
What to Know. Everything the presenter should have in their head but does not necessarily need to say. The full explanation behind each label. Background context. Supporting data. Likely questions. This is the depth layer — the difference between a presenter who handles follow-ups with confidence and one who says “let me get back to you on that.”
What to Say. The actual talk track. Verbatim language for high-stakes moments. Loose talking points for conversational slides. This section tells the presenter what story to tell and how to tell it.
This is where Nancy Duarte’s work in Resonate matters. Her central insight was the contrast between “what is” and “what could be.” The best presentations oscillate between the current reality and a better future, building tension and resolution until the audience is ready to act. The speaker creates that movement. Not the slides.
Structural Principles
A few rules that hold up across every deck I have built or reviewed.
Many simple slides beat fewer complex ones. A single statistic on a slide with nothing else can be the most powerful moment in a presentation. The impulse to consolidate is almost always wrong. Slides are free. Confused audiences are not.
One slide, one concept. If you find yourself saying “and also” while on a slide, that is your next slide.
Vary the visual weight. Two dense slides back-to-back create fatigue. Follow a complex diagram with a simple stat. The audience needs rhythm. Not every scene is a chase sequence.
Three bullets is ideal. Five is the ceiling. Each bullet is a label or short phrase. The presenter provides the meaning.
Headlines state the point. They do not label the topic. “Integration” is a label. “Connect to Any System Without Code” is a headline. The headline tells the audience where you stand.
The Pyramid Principle: Use It to Think, Not to Present
Barbara Minto developed the Pyramid Principle at McKinsey in the 1960s. Lead with the answer. Support it with key arguments. Back each argument with evidence. Top-down. Conclusion first.
This is excellent advice for documents. For written reports. For executive memos. For any situation where the reader controls the pace.
Apply it literally to a live presentation and you create a specific problem. If you put the answer on slide one and spend the rest of the deck defending it, you have eliminated tension. The audience knows where you are going. There is no journey. There is a conclusion followed by evidence.
The best presenters use the pyramid underneath a narrative arc. The pyramid organizes the logic. But the delivery follows a different shape — Duarte’s oscillation between current state and future state. The pyramid ensures the argument is rigorous. The story ensures the audience cares.
Use the pyramid to think. Use the story to present.
Jobs Understood This
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld in January 2007, his slides were almost absurdly simple. A single image. A few words. A product name.
When he introduced the concept of the iPhone, the slide showed three icons: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. He let the audience believe these were three separate products. Then he revealed they were one device.
The moment landed because the audience was listening to him. They were not reading ahead on a slide that gave away the punchline. He was telling a story. The slides were supporting it. His slides never competed with him. They never made him redundant.
The Practical Shift
Most people build presentations the wrong way around. They open PowerPoint first. They create slides. They fill those slides with content. Then they figure out what to say about each slide.
Reverse it.
Start by writing what you want to say. The full talk track. The story. The arc. The arguments. Write it without a single slide in front of you.
Then go back and decide: what visual support does each moment in this talk need?
Some moments need a stat on screen. Some need a diagram. Some need nothing at all. Some of the most powerful moments in a presentation happen with a blank screen. The audience has nothing to look at except you.
That is a tool.
The Bottom Line
Slides do not talk. You talk. The slides are there to help you tell a story.
Every piece of text on a slide should pass a single test: does the audience need to see this, or do I need to say it? If you need to say it, it belongs in your notes. If the audience needs to see it, it belongs on the slide.
Fill your speaker notes. They are not an afterthought. They are the presentation. The slides are the punctuation.
If you build a deck that makes perfect sense without a presenter, you have built a document. Call it what it is. Print it. Email it. Do not stand in front of a room and narrate it.
Build presentations that need you. Build presentations that tell a story only you can tell.
References: Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) · Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen, 3rd ed. (2019) · Nancy Duarte, Resonate (2010) · Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle (2020) · Richard Mayer, Multimedia Learning, 3rd ed. (2020)