The single most important thing you can do to improve your presentations is to use sentence titles that give the main point of each slide.
Sentence Titles vs. Category Headers
Let’s start with some definitions.
- Title: The words you put at the top of your slide.
- Category Header: A noun or noun phrase describing the subject of your slide. The title of this blog post, “Death to the Category Header,” is a category header.
- Sentence Title: A complete sentence, with a verb and a noun, that gives the main point of the slide. My opening sentence, “The single most important thing …,” is an example of a sentence title.
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The Case for Sentence Titles
- If you can’t write a clear sentence title, you don’t have a clear story. Writing sentence titles when sketching out your presentation will force you to get clear on your story.
- Sentence titles make it easier for your audience to get it. Reading + hearing generates better retention than hearing alone. And when your audience tunes out (and they will eventually), your sentence titles will help them catch up when they tune back in.
- It gives your decision-maker a chance to say, “I got it, let’s move on.” Think of all the time you’ll save.
- It makes your presentation easier to digest when you’re not there. I work with many people who consider themselves better talkers than writers, so they use simple bullet slides with category headers and they focus on their speech. Even if you can pull off an effective interaction with that model, presentations get forwarded. Give your forwarded audience a chance to understand your presentation.
- Science supports it. Studies have compared student recall when the main point was contained in the slide title vs. the first bullet. In one of these studies, the test score for the student group taught from the sentence title slides scored 37% higher than those taught from category-header slides!
How to Write Effective Sentence Titles
- Make it “so what.” Give the main point of the slide. Make it specific. Make it action-oriented. Highlight the compelling data.
- Look at the bottom of your slide. If you’re not used to writing sentence titles, you may have put your most important point there. Or you may have put the most important point in your first bullet.
- Read all your titles without looking at the content. Is your story clear? Does it flow well? If not, rewrite your titles or re-order your slides.
- Make sure your slide content supports your title. This should go without saying, but it doesn’t always happen naturally.
- Write your executive summary before (or after) your titles. If you’ve written a good executive summary, those bullets are good candidates for titles. If you write an executive summary last, your slide titles are a good place to start.
- Keep your titles to one or two lines long. Any longer and it’s hard for your audience to take it all in. And it looks sloppy on the page.
Below are sample titles from bad to great. My style is to not use periods in sentence titles, but we’ll save that debate for a future article.
- Bad: Company Revenue
- Bad: We assessed company revenue
- Good: Apple’s revenue was $52.6B in the third quarter of 2017
- Great: Apple’s revenue was $52.6B in the third quarter of 2017, up 12% from the third quarter of 2016
I was working with an entrepreneur on his pitch deck, and he was resisting my feedback to use sentence titles. We came to a slide halfway through the deck, and he had used a sentence title. I asked why there was a sentence title here and nowhere else. He said, “I always got the same question on this slide, so I thought I should put the answer at the top of the page.” I said, “Don’t all your slides deserve that?”
All your slides deserve a sentence title.