Slide copy standard for AI-made decks

Stops AI slide generators from writing label headlines, slogans and filler slides.

When to use it: Paste it into Claude Design, Gamma or any slide generator with every deck request, or use it to rewrite a finished deck.

# Slide copy standard

Paste this block into your slide generator (Claude Design, Gamma or similar) together with your deck request. It governs the words on the slides, not the visuals. It also works on a finished deck: paste it with the slide text and ask for a rewrite.

**Write the slide text exactly as specified.** Do not shorten headlines into category labels, do not convert sentences into noun-phrase fragments and do not trim prose to fit a template's default.

**Headlines are claims, not labels.** Each headline has a verb and a point of view, written as a complete clause the presenter could say out loud to the room. Test: if the headline could be an entry in a table of contents, rewrite it. "Where the work runs" becomes "Your agent does not live on your laptop anymore." Plain labels such as Agenda, Q&A or a section name are exempt.

**No slogans.** No verbless fragments chopped into beats by commas ("Three steps, right now, on your screen"), no "Not X. But Y." and no colon that sets up a payoff ("Prompting: what actually works"). Write "Three steps that we will do on your screen now." Read every headline aloud as if standing in front of the room. If you would not say it that way to a person, rewrite it.

**One statement per headline.** A trailing "and ..." clause is a second statement. Move it into the prose line below.

**State claims positively.** Where a slide has both a positive and a negative form, the positive is the headline and the negative follows in the prose.

**Write the instruction, not the aphorism.** A line that tells the audience what to do still makes sense a week later. A maxim does not.

**A figure of speech belongs in a kicker or a label, never in a prose line.** Where the body explains a mechanism, write the mechanism.

**Talk to one person.** Write "you", never "participants" or "users". Use "we" for what the room does together during the session, including live demos: "now we connect the calendar", not "now I connect". Instructions to the room ask for a completion signal ("tell me when everything is done"), never a failure confession ("raise your hand if it did not work").

**Sentences, not noun phrases.** "Reviews each action" is a fragment. "It checks every action before it runs" is a sentence and barely longer.

**Name the concrete thing.** "Anthropic's servers", not "the cloud". The exception is a number the audience can falsify, such as a headcount or a date that may move: keep it general on the slide and say it precisely out loud. Qualify any claim about the audience's own systems or about another vendor ("may not", "might have") unless you know it holds for them.

**Put the trade-off on the slide.** Never print a limit on its own. Every constraint carries, beneath it and in bold, what you do about it, even when the answer is "outside this course".

**Banned register:** leverage, unlock, empower, seamless, robust, game-changing, "in today's fast-paced". Also banned: the bullet triplet of three parallel noun phrases. [Add your own house rules here, for example: no contractions, no em dashes.]

**One idea per slide.** Voice adds warmth, not more content. A list of more than about five steps is grouped into three or four bands, each named with the verb that phase performs.

**Cut slides that manage the room instead of teaching it:** the break slide, the purely motivational line, the contingency slide or fallback row for people whose setup failed, the restatement of a rule already given, the progress map and the meta-slide that explains the exercise. The presenter says each of these in one sentence.

**If the presenter must say a sentence for the slide to make sense, that sentence belongs on the slide.** Stories and asides stay spoken. Meaning does not. The converse also holds: scheduling details and caveats already stated once are spoken, not printed.

**Density varies by slide type.**
- Concept, comparison, key takeaway, quote and framework slides: a claim headline plus one line of real prose, with any bullets kept short. These slides should teach a reader who has no speaker.
- Agenda, what's next and diagram slides: a human headline plus one line of prose, with the structure beneath kept short.
- Title, section divider, demo, code or prompt, exercise and end slides: minimal. Something else on screen is the content.
- A few slides may specify two or three sentences. Render them at that length. If more than about a fifth of the deck runs long, it has become a document.

**Captions are not a free slot.** Write one only when it carries a fact stated nowhere else on the slide. Never use a caption to repeat the headline or to reassure.

**When the artifact is the slide, drop the headline.** A command the audience will type or an exercise list that stays on screen sets larger with no headline above it.

**Typography floors.** Body and list text stays at [20-24pt] and is never shrunk to fit. Make whitespace with margins and leading. If content does not fit at that size, split the slide.

**Before you finish,** check that no two slides of the same type sit next to each other and that no slot is left empty for you to invent.