How to write a presentation outline

To write a presentation outline, start with one sentence that says what the audience should believe or do when you finish. Then write one line per slide: the headline the slide will state, and the evidence that proves it. Read the list aloud, cut anything that does not serve the sentence, reorder until each line follows from the last, and build the slides only when the list reads as an argument.

One sentence goal

Garr Reynolds, who wrote Presentation Zen, puts the first question simply: if the audience could remember only one thing, what would you want that to be? Toastmasters magazine calls the same idea the thesis, the one sentence summary that sets the tone for the whole speech and makes the outline easier to develop.

Write that sentence before anything else, and make it a claim, not a topic. Lessons from the outage is a topic. Practising failure in production cut restore time from over four hours to 38 minutes is a claim. The claim tells you which slides earn their place: anything that does not help prove it is a candidate for cutting.

The conference talk deck example on this site, nine slides for a thirty minute reliability engineering slot by an invented platform engineer, has its claim on the cover: the team deleted its own database on purpose. The table below this article reconstructs the outline behind it, one line per slide.

A headline per slide

Each line in the outline is the sentence that slide will say. Not the slide’s topic, but its point. In outline form, slide three of the example is not restore time but restoring took 11 hours 40 minutes, and slide seven is not results but time to first action fell from 46 minutes to 7. The on screen titles are then written from those points; the example titles slide seven what nine months changed, with the numbers carried by the table beneath it.

Writing headlines as sentences does two things. It tests whether you actually have a point for every slide: a line you cannot finish as a sentence is a slide you do not need yet. And it lets you read the outline top to bottom as a story. If the headlines alone make sense in order, the talk will.

Hamilton College’s guide to outlining a speech recommends two or three main points, with a transition statement between each. In a slide outline, the transitions are your divider slides and the first headline after each. The example has two chapters, each opened by a divider that is only a large number and a short title.

Evidence per slide

Next to each headline, write what will prove it on screen. One number, a before and after table, five steps, a quote. The evidence column is where outlines usually fall apart, because it shows which headlines are assertions with nothing behind them.

In the example, the evidence gets heavier as the talk goes on. Slide three is one hero number with three sentences explaining where eleven hours went. Slide four puts the reported cause, a bad migration, beside the three things that actually cost the time: an untested runbook, nobody owning the decision, and no practice under stress. Slide seven is a six row table of before and after measures. By the time slide eight offers six rules to take home, the evidence has been shown, which is why the rules are believable.

If a headline has no evidence available, you have three choices: find it, soften the headline to what you can prove, or cut the slide.

Cut before you build

Reynolds recommends doing this planning analog, with pen and paper, and asking of every piece of content whether it truly serves the message; if you cannot say how, cut it. Cutting a line on paper takes a second. Cutting a finished slide you spent an hour on takes willpower.

Three cuts are almost always right:

• The agenda slide in a short talk. In a thirty minute talk with two chapters, the dividers do the agenda’s job.
• The background slide. Background the audience needs goes into the headline of the first real slide. Background they do not need goes.
• The second example. One well chosen example proves the point. Two make the audience wait for the third.

Then read the outline aloud against a clock. Toastmasters’ guidance is that if a speech sounds disjointed, go back and re-examine the order, because what looks fine on paper can sound awkward when spoken. Short formats make this discipline visible: the question page on Pecha Kucha explains the twenty slides at twenty seconds format, where an unplanned slide is impossible to hide.

From outline to deck

When the outline holds, building the deck is mostly transcription. Each line becomes a slide, each headline its title, each evidence note its main element. The job column in the table tells you what kind of slide to use: a hook becomes a cover, a chapter becomes a divider, a result becomes a table or a metrics slide.

The shape of the outline also decides slide count. The example uses nine slides for thirty minutes because it has two chapters and one piece of evidence per point. The keynote presentation example uses twelve slides for forty minutes, with three stories and four almost wordless slides that give the speaker room. The demo day deck example fits a pitch into eight slides and five minutes, which only works because every line of its outline was cut to a single claim.

Put minutes against the lines before you build, not after. A thirty minute slot for the example might read: one minute for the hook, eight for the outage chapter, six for the method, six for the results table, four for the rules, two for the ask and three left for questions. If the minutes do not add up, the outline is too long, and it is far easier to cut a line now than to rush three slides at the end. Timings also show where the talk is thin: a chapter that needs eight minutes but has one slide will either overrun the slide or run short of material.

Keep the planning outline after the deck is built. Its sentences are the first draft of your speaker notes, and the post on how to write speaker notes turns each one into a short set of prompts you can glance at mid talk.

Common mistakes

• Starting in the slide software. The layout starts making decisions for you before the argument exists.
• Topics instead of headlines. A list of nouns is not an outline.
• No evidence column. Assertions look fine until someone asks how you know.
• Too many main points. Two or three, then stop.
• Never reading it aloud. Order problems are heard, not seen.
• Scripting every word. Toastmasters quotes a coach who scripted every word in early speeches and found it added stress and removed spontaneity. Outline, then prompt.

Build it

An outline is exactly what the page on slides from your own text is for. Paste the goal and your line per slide list into the generator; the prompt box takes up to 8,000 characters and needs at least 8 to submit. Set the length slider to your slide count, anywhere from 3 to 20, because it starts at 3. There is no outline review step: slides stream into the builder as they are made, and you edit from there. If your outline cites research, add the sources yourself, because slide sources are never printed on the slides.

The guide to making a pitch presentation with AI walks the generator, restyling, adding slides and exporting. Attaching your own files to build from is available on the Starter plan and up.