Your notes aren’t the problem. The order you put them in is, and one Reddit prompt fixes that before you touch a single slide. The original poster, u/FormalSad2143, shared it on r/PromptEngineering after getting sick of watching rooms check their phones during forty-slide dumps. Nobody taught us how to build a talk. We got taught how to fill slides, and those are two completely different skills. So this Redditor built a prompt that skips the deck entirely. It doesn’t touch design, colors, or templates. It forces the thinking to happen first: what’s the one thing your audience remembers a week later, and does every slide actually earn its place on the way to that point.
The Real Problem: We Skip Straight To Decoration
Most talks start the same broken way. You take your notes, dump them across forty slides, and read them out loud while everyone in the room checks their phones. The deck becomes a container for information instead of an argument. You end up with a slide called “Market Overview” followed by a slide called “Our Approach,” and nothing connecting the two except that they sat next to each other in your notes app.
This creator’s fix is blunt: don’t design anything until you have a spine. A spine is the sequence of claims that lead somewhere, not a pile of bullet points organized by topic. You wouldn’t start formatting paragraphs before you knew what an essay was arguing, and a talk deserves the same discipline.
How The Prompt Actually Works
Paste your notes in, and the prompt runs four steps in order:
- It asks for the single point your audience should remember a week later, in one sentence.
- It builds your outline as a chain of claims, each one a full sentence you could say out loud, not a label like “Background” or “Results.”
- Under every claim, it keeps only the evidence that earns it and cuts the rest.
- It flags the two spots where you’re most likely to lose the room, and explains why.
No slide design, no padding to hit a time limit. If a section doesn’t serve the main point, the prompt tells you to drop it. That’s the part people resist most, since half of us build decks around the research we’re proud of, not the research the audience actually needs.
Why Step 2 Is Doing The Heavy Lifting
The original poster called this out themselves, and a commenter agreed: turning every slide title into a claim instead of a noun is the part that actually fixes things. When your titles read “Background” and “Results,” nobody following along can tell where the argument is going. When they read as full sentences, a reader can follow the entire talk just by scanning the headings.
Try it on your last deck: read only the titles top to bottom. If they don’t form a coherent argument on their own, your audience was never going to follow it live either. One commenter said they started doing something similar for client pitches, and it’s the reason their slides finally made sense without them talking over every single one.
The honest catch, straight from the author: the prompt will happily tell you your notes support a claim they don’t actually support. You still have to fact-check your own argument. Think of it as a structure engine, not a truth engine.
🎯 Use Cases
- Conference talks: turn a pile of research notes into a spine before you open Google Slides.
- Client pitches: replace generic section headers with claims the client can follow without you narrating.
- Internal updates: force a “so what” out of a status report before it becomes forty bullet points nobody reads.
- Sales decks: cut the padding slides that exist only to hit a page count.
Prompt Of The Day
Copy this exactly and swap in your own details:
I’m giving a [X] minute talk on [topic] to [audience]. Here are my raw notes: [paste]. Do this, in order:
- Tell me the single point someone should remember a week later. One sentence.
- Build the outline as a sequence of claims that lead to that point. Each slide is one claim, written as a full sentence I could say out loud, not a topic label.
- Under each claim, list only the evidence or example that earns it. Cut everything that does not.
- Flag the two spots where I’m likely to lose the room, and why.
Do not design anything. Do not pad it to fill time. If a section does not serve the main point, tell me to drop it.
Run this before you open your slide software, not after. Once you’ve got the spine, actually building the deck takes about twenty minutes, because every slide already knows its one job.
I’ve sat through enough design-tips videos that never once told me to check whether my argument even held together. This does that in one prompt.
Head over to the original thread on r/PromptEngineering to see the full discussion and how other people are adapting it for their own talks.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can my slides make sense without me talking over them?
Yes, that’s the core of this approach. The commenter ditched titles like “Brand Overview” and “Market Trends” for claim-based titles, and found people could follow the thread even if they zoned out for 30 seconds. Try reading your slide titles in order; if they form a complete argument without you there, you’re ready.
Q: How do I know which slides to keep and which to cut?
If a slide pushes your main argument forward, keep it. If it’s just filling time, cut it. The commenter noticed they could “feel it immediately” when something didn’t earn its place. The prompt helps flag these, but you’re the final judge.
Q: Does this work for pitches and other presentations, or just talks?
It works for both. The commenter successfully used this method for client pitches after learning it for talks. The structure stays the same, one main takeaway, claim-based titles, evidence under each claim. Format varies; the framework is universal.
Q: What if the prompt says my notes don’t actually support my claim?
That’s honest feedback. The author warns the prompt can tell you your notes support something they don’t. Use that as a signal to find better examples or rethink your main point entirely. You’re still the fact-checker.
Here’s the prompt that turned my messy notes into a talk, and taught me how to make a good presentation by accident
by u/FormalSad2143 in PromptEngineering