Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides: The Importance of Writing Sentence Headlines

Presentation slides are often used for teaching engineering classes, presenting engineering research, and explaining engineering designs. For those presentations in which the presenter desires to communicate and defend results, using a succinct sentence headline for all slides but the title slide has three advantages over relying on a phrase headline. The first is that a sentence headline not only can identify the topic, but also can state an assertion about the topic. Emphasizing the assertions in an engineering presentation is advantageous, because audiences are more inclined to believe an argument if they realize the assertions and sub-assertions. Also, for a presentation that serves as a classroom assignment, having the student write sentence headlines provides a written record for the faculty member of that student's assertions in the presentation. A second advantage of using sentence headlines, rather than phrase headlines, is that a sentence headline can clarify much more effectively the role of the slide in the presentation. Such a clarification not only helps the audience during the presentation, but also serves the audience reviewing the slides days or weeks later. Yet a third advantage, and perhaps the most important, is that a sentence headline forces the presenter to come to grips with the main purpose of each slide. If the presenter cannot create a sentence headline that states the slide's main purpose in the presentation, then the presenter should consider cutting that slide from the presentation. For engineering presenters who have used this design, the result has been that significantly fewer slides are presented, thus helping the presenters avoid a frenetic pace, which undermines so many engineering presentations. This paper uses several examples from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech to show these three advantages. The paper also analyzes why faculty and students are reluctant to use sentence headlines. Finally, the paper includes a preliminary assessment on the effectiveness of these sentence headlines in engineering presentations.