27. You Can’t Use a Sentence As a Prompt!: Less Verbiage Is More Useful

A senior engineering manager at a large telecommunications equipment company was one of the participants in a Power Presentations program. True to her technical nature, she wanted to be as accurate in her presentation as in her work, so when she headed up to the front of the room to deliver the pitch she had prepared, she brought along her laptop, with her slides as speaker notes. Having diligently practiced, she started her pitch smoothly, but about a minute into it, she lost track of her content, a fate that befalls many people in front of live audiences. Her eyes darted down to the laptop for a cue, and she suddenly froze. A horrified look came across her face and she blurted, “You can’t use a sentence as a prompt!”

In that one moment, she understood the importance of the difference between a presentation and a document. When her eyes moved down to the slide, she saw a full sentence with all the necessary parts of speech: articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and helping verbs. That construct would have been necessary in a document, which must be free-standing and independent of the presenter.

But in a presentation, in which the presenter is the focus and the slides function only as support or illustration, bullets must be treated as headlines, containing only key words: nouns, verbs, and modifiers. Had the engineer followed that simple notion, she would have seen only a few words in her glance, more than enough to serve as a prompt. When she realized that a sentence, with all its detailed parts, is a hindrance rather than a help, she became an instant convert to the headline approach.

Are you ready to convert?