In-House Counsel

PowerPoint Decks: Write The Speaking Notes First

If you prepare the slides first, you'll write on the slides everything that you want to say. Don't do this.

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You have to give a presentation.

So you need a deck. 

This is ridiculous, but it’s true.

Once upon a time, people delivered talks without reading from slides.  Or people prepared materials that contained paragraphs, rather than bullet points.

But that was long ago.

Today, even if you’re giving a 10-minute presentation on some obscure subject to the committee that doesn’t really matter, you need a deck.

Okay; I relent.

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But how should you prepare the deck?

My suggestion is that you should write the speaking notes first.  Only then should you prepare the slides themselves.

Why?

If you prepare the slides first, you’ll write on the slides everything that you want to say. 

That doesn’t leave much room for additional ideas to put in the speaking notes.

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When you deliver the presentation, you’ll just be reading from the slides.  Which is pretty boring.

And the slides will contain way too many words, because you’ve written on the slides everything that you intend to say.

Consider preparing the presentation in the other order:  Write the speaking notes first.

You can reasonably include in the speaking notes every important point, because you do want to cover all those points in your presentation.  The speaking notes can cover all the topics.

Only then should you think about what should be on the slides. The slides can highlight key points, or present tangents, or contain cartoons, or whatever.  But the slides won’t contain the entire text of your talk, which is a misuse of slides and painful for your audience.

This is even more important if you’re preparing a deck that will be used by somebody other than you to give a presentation.

Suppose you’re preparing a deck for the important person to use next week.  If you start with the slides, you’ll include on the slides everything that you want the important person to say.  After all, the important person doesn’t necessarily know anything about the subject, so you have to be over-inclusive.

What happens?  Your slides are now too long and the important person’s presentation will consist of reading the slides.

This is not good.

So start with the speaking notes.  Write down everything the important person should know or say.   Be as comprehensive as you like; these are just the speaking notes.

Only then should you think about the slides.

Once you’ve decided on the substance of the talk, you can think about the next subject — appropriate slides to illustrate what’s being said.

That’s a different subject, and it requires a different emphasis.

So far as I can tell, few people prepare presentations this way.  Most people essentially write the entire presentation on the slides, and then read those over-long slide to the audience.

If you think about it, that’s not a very good way to prepare things.

Maybe I’ll send you a deck on the issue.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at [email protected].

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