How to write slide titles

To write slide titles, state each slide’s point as a short sentence instead of labelling its topic. ARR finished 2 per cent ahead of plan while hiring ran six behind is a title; Scorecard is a filing label. Give each slide one claim, keep the title to two lines, and then read all the titles in order without the slides. If they tell the story, the deck is structured; if they do not, fix the order before the design.

Action titles, not labels

A topic label tells the audience what a slide is about. An action title tells them what it shows. The difference matters because an audience reads the title first and decides from it whether to study the slide or wait for you to explain.

The assertion evidence approach, developed at Penn State by Michael Alley and colleagues, is built on this idea. It replaces phrase headlines, which do not communicate the takeaway message, with succinct sentence assertions supported by visual evidence rather than bullet lists. Washington University in St Louis’s Center for Teaching and Learning summarises a study by Joanna Garner and Michael Alley in which students who saw slides with assertion sentence headlines scored higher on comprehension questions, and scored higher again on a quiz a week later, than students who saw conventional slides.

The board meeting deck example on this site is a good slide set to practise on. It is twelve slides for an invented software company’s quarterly board meeting, and its content is already rigorous: a scorecard with plan, actual and variance, an ARR bridge from $20.3 million to $22.1 million, every enterprise deal won or lost with its reason. The table below this article rewrites its labels, and those of five other decks here, as action titles using only what is already on each slide.

One claim per slide

A sentence title forces one claim per slide, because two claims make a sentence nobody can read. Y Combinator’s guidance on pitch deck design makes the same point from the other side: a simple slide expresses one idea, and a crowded slide becomes complex. Its test is practical: show the slide to a stranger and ask what it means.

When a slide seems to need two claims, split it. The board deck’s scorecard carries six metrics, but the claim is about the two variances that matter, ARR two per cent ahead and headcount six behind. The other four metrics are evidence on the slide, not rivals for the title.

When a slide has no claim, ask whether it needs to exist. A slide titled Background, Overview or Update usually holds material that belongs in the pre-read or in what you say aloud.

Length

Aim for one sentence that fits on two lines at presentation size, roughly eight to fifteen words. The assertion evidence approach describes its headlines as succinct; the constraint is that a title has to be readable in the second or two before the audience looks at the evidence.

Numbers help titles stay short. $2.3 million of new and expansion ARR outweighed $0.5 million of churn is fourteen words and carries the whole ARR bridge. Cutting adjectives helps too: strong, significant and robust add length and no information.

If a title will not fit, the slide is doing too much or the claim is not clear yet. Rewrite the claim before shrinking the type.

Subtitles take the overflow. The scope, period or source of a claim, such as last twelve months or board approved budget, is useful and does not need to compete for the title line. The board deck’s scorecard does this well: its note that plan means the board approved FY27 budget, not the latest forecast, sits in small type under the table where a sceptical director will look for it.

Titles as a storyline

Barbara Minto’s pyramid principle says ideas are easiest to grasp when organised under a single point, and slide titles are where a deck’s pyramid becomes visible. Read the titles of a well built deck in order and they form a paragraph.

Try it on the board deck, with action titles in place on its argument slides. The quarter closed at $22.1 million ARR, ahead of plan. ARR finished 2 per cent ahead while hiring ran six behind. New and expansion ARR outweighed churn and contraction by $1.8 million. EBITDA came in $0.25 million worse than plan. Both enterprise losses stalled on security review or price. Two risks need action this quarter. Enterprise sales hiring waits on today’s pricing decision. Three decisions follow: pricing, lease and option pool. A director who reads only those lines knows what the meeting is about and why the decisions are on the agenda.

The same test finds structural problems. If two consecutive titles say the same thing, cut one. If a title only makes sense after the next slide, swap them. If the titles jump without a connection, a slide is missing. The Series A deck example is worth reading this way because its titles are a mix. Some already argue: what the seed round bought opens the deck on progress rather than setup, and the market slide’s body states that the 36 per cent of firms with ten to 249 staff are the whole serviceable market. Others are labels, such as traction, the team and the ask, where the evidence beneath is strong enough that promoting a number to the title would cost nothing. Reading the list shows exactly which slides to rewrite first: the ones whose label hides the best number in the deck.

Examples rewritten

The rewrites in the table follow three patterns.

Put the number in the title. The SaaS pitch deck example titles slide four ARR by quarter, with the growth in the subtitle. As a title, ARR grew from $310k to $2.05M in seven quarters says what the chart shows before anyone reads an axis.

State the pattern, not the list. A table of six deals titled Enterprise, won and lost asks the board to find the pattern. Both losses stalled on security review or price hands it to them, and sets up the SOC 2 risk two slides later.

Name the threshold. The project kickoff deck example lists five success measures. Leading with stock accuracy from 91 to 98 per cent tells the room which measure the project will be judged on.

For data slides specifically, the post on presenting data in slides covers writing chart headlines as findings, including the cover the chart with your hand test.

Common mistakes

• Labels on argument slides. Results, Market, Team.
• Questions as titles. Why does churn matter? makes the audience wait for the answer; state it.
• Two claims joined by and. Split the slide.
• Vague verbs. Revenue update, performance review, strategy overview.
• Titles that contradict the chart. Grew strongly above a flat line destroys trust in every other slide.
• Changing style slide to slide. Pick sentence case or title case and keep it.

Build it

Every slide layout in the builder belongs to one of 26 roles, and the page on slide roles lists them; the question page on slide layouts explains how a layout differs from a template and a theme. Roles such as metrics, comparison and takeaway suit action titles; cover, divider and closing roles keep shorter phrases.

Title text is styled like any other text: size from the theme’s 19 class type ramp, one of 27 fonts, seven weights and left, centre or right alignment. The guide to styling text and adding callouts, stats and lists covers those controls. To rewrite every title in a deck at once, ask the AI assistant; its edits land as a preview you apply or discard, and the backend never changes the deck on its own.