Ten minutes before a client demo, you finally notice slide 7 says nothing. You’ve read that deck twelve times and your brain stopped seeing it five reads ago. That’s the exact trap u/WorthIngenuity5555 got tired of falling into. This Redditor built a prompt, shared over in r/PromptEngineering, to catch dead slides before a live audience does. It’s one of the sharper self-editing prompts I’ve seen shared this month.
The idea is simple: stop asking the model to fix your deck. Ask it to attack the deck instead, and don’t let it write a single new word until the damage report is done.
🎯 Why It Matters
Most feedback prompts skip straight to rewriting, which sounds helpful but quietly wastes the lesson. If the model fixes your weak headline the second it spots one, you never learn why the original failed. You just get a nicer version of the same blind spot, ready to reappear on your next deck.
This prompt forces a pause between diagnosis and treatment. The author’s phrasing nails the real test too: can you get the point of a slide in under five seconds? That’s a much harder bar than the usual “is this good,” and it’s the bar your actual audience is quietly using anyway.
It also takes the ego out of the room. You stop negotiating with yourself over a slide you already suspect is weak, because the model has zero investment in your deck looking good.
🧾 The Prompt
Here’s the exact text the original poster shared, reproduced as written:
Act as a tough but fair reviewer of my slide content. Do not rewrite it yet, critique it.
Slides (headline + bullets per slide):
[PASTE]For each slide, answer:
- Can I tell the single point of this slide in under 5 seconds? If not, why not.
- Is the headline a claim or just a topic label? (Topic labels are weak here.)
- Are any bullets actually full paragraphs pretending to be bullets?
- Does this slide earn its place, or could it be cut or merged?
Then, across the whole deck:
- Is there a clear through-line, or does it jump around?
- Which 2 slides are the weakest and why?
Be specific and blunt. I’d rather fix it now than in front of people.
Three moves make this work. Assigning a “tough but fair” role pushes the model away from its default cheerleading mode. Splitting slide-level questions from deck-level questions catches two different failure modes. One is a slide that rambles on its own. The other is a deck that jumps around even when every slide reads fine alone. Naming the two weakest slides by number forces a real answer instead of a vague “it’s mostly solid.”
Two variations are worth stealing. First, ask for a severity score from 1 to 5 on each slide after the critique lands. That way you rank fixes instead of tackling them in random order. Second, point the same structure at a one-pager or a pitch email. Just swap “slide” for “paragraph” and “headline” for “opening line.” The bones of the prompt hold up fine outside of slides.
🛠️ How To Run It
Paste your outline as headline plus bullets per slide, exactly like the placeholder shows. Run the critique on its own first, and resist the urge to ask for fixes in the same message. Read the answers, especially the two weakest slides, before you touch anything.
Only after that should you go back and ask for rewrites, one slide at a time if the deck is long. The author flagged the topic-label check as the harshest one. A headline like “Q3 Results” tells the reviewer nothing. “Q3 revenue beat plan by 12%” gives it an actual claim to test.
💡 Tips & Tricks
Try running the critique twice, once before you edit and once after, on the same deck. If the second pass still flags the same weak slide, that slide needs cutting, not polishing.
Swap the audience assumption in the role line if you’re prepping something less formal, like an internal update instead of a client pitch. The “5 seconds” bar gets even stricter with a distracted internal audience.
Add your own gut-check question to the list. This industry pro’s version is “if I deleted this slide, would anyone miss it,” and it’s brutal in the best way. Most decks have at least two slides that fail it.
🚀 Give It A Shot
Next deck you build, run it through this before anyone else sees it. Cheap insurance beats an awkward silence in the room. Check out the original thread in r/PromptEngineering for more of this Redditor’s approach to self-editing prompts.
A self-critique prompt that audits your own slides for clarity before anyone else sees them
by u/WorthIngenuity5555 in PromptEngineering