Writing the Slide
A free excerpt from The Last Slide by Manish Katariya.
A slide is not a container for everything you know. It is the smallest unit of an argument — one idea, stated as a claim, proven by what sits beneath it. If a colleague can glance at the title and know what you want them to believe, the slide is working. If they have to read the body to reconstruct the point, it is not.
The title is the slide
Most decks bury their message in a noun. “Q3 Revenue” tells the reader the topic, not the takeaway. Replace the topic with a sentence: “Q3 revenue grew 14%, but margin fell — pricing, not demand, is the problem.” Now the chart below has a job: prove that one sentence. Everything that does not serve it comes off the slide.
One idea, governed by the Pyramid
The Pyramid Principle gives the slide its spine. Lead with the answer. Group the support into three or four mutually exclusive reasons. Let each reason resolve to data the reader can check. A slide that obeys this structure can be read in the order the eye naturally travels — title, then groups, then evidence — and never doubles back.
The discipline of subtraction
The hardest edit is removal. Every chart junk element, every hedging adverb, every “various” and “several” is a small tax on the reader’s attention. Numbers before adjectives. The verdict in one line, then the nuance. When the slide says only what it must, the room trusts it — and trust is the currency you spend on the last slide.
The rest of the chapter walks through twelve before/after slide teardowns from real engagements.