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Presentation deck prompt — why fixing the slide count first ruins it
Why 'make me a 10-slide deck' ends in overtime, and what to give instead of a slide count.
By Mephify (operator)4 min read
What makes this hard
A typical request
Make a 10-slide deck introducing our new product
Fixing the slide count looks considerate, but the order is backwards.
What comes first in a presentation is not the slide count but the time and the audience. Speaking through one slide takes roughly a minute to a minute and a half. Force 10 slides into a 5-minute talk and each gets 30 seconds. At that pace no slide lands. Give the time instead, and the count falls out by arithmetic.
The other common failure: on-screen text and the speaker's script come out merged. When slides are full of sentences, the audience reads instead of listening. Unless the request separates the two, AI just cuts one essay into slide-sized pieces.
What to add to the request
1. Give time and audience as fixed values
'A 10-minute executive briefing' and 'a 30-minute peer seminar' produce completely different decks from the same content. Say derive the slide count from the time and you get a number with a basis.
2. Force one message per slide
Put three things on one slide and the audience takes away none. Require one key sentence per slide, decided first, with only what supports it on that slide. For internal reporting, also specify conclusion-first ordering. Building up from background spends the decision-maker's time.
3. Separate screen text from script
Rewrite it like this
10-minute executive briefing; audience is the CMO. Derive slide count from the time. For each slide write the on-screen text (one-line title + 3–5 lines) and the spoken script separately. Conclusion on slide one.
Why six kinds are taken separately
The Slides studio takes internal reports, investor or sales pitches, lectures and seminars, research presentations, debates, and events or briefings as six separate kinds. Deriving the slide count from time and separating screen text from script are common to all of them, but what is prepared first and in what order it's laid out differs.
- Internal report — the conclusion, one sentence, is slide one; evidence stays within three slides; the last slide says what has to be decided, by whom, by when. For an executive audience, execution detail goes to an appendix
- Investor or sales pitch — problem → solution → why us → the ask, in that order. Market size and competitive edge use sourced figures only, traction states absolute numbers with the period rather than growth rates alone, and the final slide is the ask
- Lecture or seminar — starts from what the audience already knows, pairs every concept with an example, and puts a check question or activity every 20 minutes. Material you supplied is rearranged by prerequisite order, not list order
- Research presentation — research question → method and data → results → interpretation → limitations. Results and interpretation never share a slide, and the limitations slide isn't dropped for a general audience
- Debate — every argument is paired with the expected rebuttal and the counter, weak evidence is marked weak, and the number of arguments is cut to fit the speaking time
- Event or briefing — what the audience needs to know is separated from what it needs to do, stated as actionable items: dates, venue, what to bring, deadlines. Unsupplied dates and contacts are never invented
How the instruction ends — it asks about the blanks and stops
A deck with open blanks isn't a deck yet. This service's instruction has the target AI collect the remaining [FILL IN] slots by number, attach to each a line on what goes there plus examples or a default to choose from, ask whether to complete with those filled, complete as is, or fix the structure first, and then wait for your answer.
If you decide not to fill a slot, it becomes a sentence the presenter says live, or the slide is dropped. And if you chose 'script only' as the deliverable, no slide count is derived at all — computing slides for a deliverable that has none is ordering work nobody will use, so the time basis becomes the actual reading length of the script.
Checklist for writing it yourself
- 1Did you give time and audience — not a slide count in their place
- 2Did you require one key message per slide
- 3Did you require screen text and script to be separate
- 4Did you require a source slot on slides that carry numbers
- 5Did you keep working labels like 'claim/evidence/source' off the slides? Those are the maker's notes, not the audience's screen
The Slides studio takes six kinds separately: internal reporting, pitching, lectures, research talks, debates and events. Each needs different material. Reports lead with the conclusion; research talks lead with method and limitations.
Reading helps; trying is faster.