Everyone knows slides should have less text. Everyone produces slides with too much text anyway. That gap is worth understanding, because the usual advice — “use fewer words” — does not address why it keeps happening.
The real cause
Most dense slides are dense because the deck is doing two jobs. It is the visual aid for a live presentation and the document people read afterwards. Those requirements pull in opposite directions, and the slide ends up serving neither.
A presented slide should carry one idea and let the presenter supply the rest. A read document needs enough detail to stand alone. Trying to satisfy both produces a slide too wordy to present from and too fragmented to read properly.
Why it costs you
People cannot read and listen at the same time. Put a paragraph on screen and your audience reads it, which means they stop listening to you. You are competing with your own slide, and the slide usually wins.
Worse, dense slides hide the argument. When everything is on screen, nothing is emphasised, and the reader has to work out what matters. Most will not bother.
What to do instead
Separate the two documents
Build the presented deck sparse, and put the detail in speaker notes or a leave-behind. This is the fix, and it is the one people resist because it feels like more work. It is less work than presenting badly.
One idea per slide
If a slide needs a word like “and” or “also” to describe it, it is two slides. Splitting costs nothing — slides are free — and the deck becomes easier to follow even though it is longer.
Turn statements into structure
A paragraph explaining how three things relate becomes a diagram. A list of numbers becomes a chart. A sequence becomes a timeline. In each case the reader understands faster and the slide holds less text.
Cut the sentence down to the claim
“Our customer acquisition cost has decreased significantly over the last four quarters due to improvements in our onboarding funnel” becomes a headline reading “CAC down across four quarters” with a chart underneath. The reason belongs in your mouth, not on the slide.
The test
Put the deck in slide sorter view and look at it from across the room. You should be able to tell what each slide is about from its shape — where the emphasis sits, whether it is a chart or a statement or a comparison. If every slide looks like a grey rectangle of text, the deck has a structural problem, not a wording problem.
One caveat
Sparse is not automatically better. A slide with three words and a stock photograph communicates nothing. The goal is not less content; it is content in the right form, and some of it genuinely belongs elsewhere in the deck rather than deleted.
