How much text on a slide

How much text belongs on a slide depends on whether you are presenting it or sending it. For a slide you speak over, use a sentence title and roughly 30 to 60 words of supporting content, much less on covers and dividers, and say the rest. For a deck read without you, full sentences are fine, but the numbers in the table below show the range finished decks actually use. In both cases, words that do not serve the slide’s one point should go.

What the research says

The best evidence comes from Richard Mayer’s work on multimedia learning. A chapter by Mayer and Logan Fiorella in the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning reviews the experiments behind several design principles, and two apply directly to slide text.

The coherence principle: people learn more deeply when extraneous material is excluded rather than included. It was supported in 23 of 23 experimental tests, with a median effect size of 0.86, which is large for education research. Extraneous means anything not needed for the point: decorative detail, interesting asides, a second example.

The redundancy principle: people learn more deeply from graphics and narration than from graphics, narration and on-screen text. Supported in 16 of 16 tests, median effect size 0.86. When the words on screen repeat what the speaker is saying, the audience tries to reconcile the two streams and learns less.

A third, the signalling principle, cuts the other way and explains what text is for: cues that highlight the organisation of the material help, supported in 24 of 28 tests with a smaller median effect of 0.41. A clear title, a numbered step and a label on a chart are signals. A paragraph is not.

The assertion evidence approach turns this into a slide design: a sentence headline stating the message, supported by visual evidence rather than a bulleted list, which its authors say creates clutter and leaves the audience unsure where to look.

Words by slide role

The table below this article counts every visible word on 590 slides across the 54 presentation examples on this site, grouped by slide role in the 44 decks that label their roles. The median across every slide is 78 words.

Three patterns stand out. Structural slides are nearly empty: dividers have a median of 14 words and covers 28. Number slides stay lean: metrics slides have a median of 51, and many of those words are labels and axis names rather than prose. Explanation slides are the heaviest: content slides at 130 and framework slides at 132.

These are decks written as finished examples, many built to be read as well as presented, so the medians sit above what a live talk should use. The keynote presentation example shows the presented end of the range: 477 words across twelve slides, about 40 a slide, with two dividers under 20 words and the call to action slide at 21. The board meeting deck example, a pre-read sent five days ahead, carries 662 words across twelve.

The embedded example, slide by slide

The compliance training deck example, a 40 minute session for an invented logistics company, carries 774 words across twelve slides. Its counts show text doing different jobs.

The three dividers carry 13 or 14 words each: a number, a policy name and one line. The cover has 24. The heaviest slides are the privacy do and do not slide at 135 words and the phone scenario at 134, and both are justified: the first replaces an eleven page policy with twelve lines, and the scenario has to state a situation and three options before anyone can choose. The conflicts fact check drops to 48 words, because a true or false question needs a statement and an answer, nothing else.

That is the useful rule from the counts: text should scale with what the audience must do on that slide. Read and decide needs more. Look and listen needs less.

Presented decks and read decks

A deck is usually one of two things, and the text budget follows.

Presented. The speaker carries the explanation. Slides hold the claim and the evidence: a title sentence, a number, a chart, a short list. Aim for the low end of the table, and let dividers and single number slides be almost empty. Y Combinator’s pitch deck design guidance for Demo Day puts it as three rules, legible, simple and obvious, and pictures the audience member at the back of a 500 person room.

Read. Sent ahead or left behind, with no speaker. Full sentences are necessary, and the higher medians are appropriate. Nielsen Norman Group’s readability guidance still applies: short sentences, plain words and active voice, because a reader skims a deck the way they skim a web page.

Trying to make one file do both jobs is where overloaded slides come from. If a deck will be presented and then sent, keep the presented version lean and move the detail into notes, a written summary or an appendix.

Bullets, sentences and visuals

Bullets are not the problem; unrelated bullets are. A list of parallel items, like the compliance deck’s six dos and six do nots, is efficient. A list of disconnected thoughts under a topic label is a paragraph with the connecting words removed.

Prefer, in order: a visual that makes the point, a single number with a label, a short parallel list, and only then a sentence or two. If a slide needs a paragraph to make sense, it is usually a slide for reading, and it belongs in the written version.

Common mistakes

• Shrinking type to fit. If the words only fit at a smaller size, there are too many words.
• The script on the slide. Writing what you will say on the slide guarantees you will read it, and the redundancy research says the audience learns less.
• One deck for reading and presenting. It ends up too dense to present and too thin to read.
• Decorative text. Taglines, repeated logos with slogans and long footers are extraneous material in the coherence principle’s sense.
• Bullets without a claim. Five bullets under a label leave the audience to work out the point you should have written as the title.
• Every slide the same density. A divider with 60 words and a scenario with 20 is backwards; let text follow the job the slide does.

Put the rest in speaker notes

Everything you cut from a presented slide still exists; it moves to the notes. The post on how to write speaker notes gives a four line pattern per slide, and the question page on speaker notes defines them. For session design around the slides, the post on training presentation structure covers pacing objectives, practice and checks.

Build it

Speaker notes in the builder are rich text stored per slide, with bold, italic, underline, bullets and numbering, and they are never rendered on the slide itself. The page on speaker notes covers them. In present mode, N shows the notes, and a pop out window titled Speaker notes shows them with the slide number so you can drag it to a second screen. Three things to know: notes are not included in PDF or PowerPoint exports, anyone with a share link can press N and read them, and the notes pane only appears on screens 1024 pixels wide and above.

The guide to presenting with speaker notes and the pen walks through present mode. When a slide still feels crowded, the text styling controls use the theme’s 19 class type ramp, so reducing words keeps the design consistent where shrinking type would not.