Presentation pointers

4 March 2025

In the US, titles are indeed ‘title-case’ i.e. the initial letter of each word is capitalised: This Is A Title
In Europe, this is not the case: This is a title
Titles do not have full-stops (periods in American English)¹

Underlining should not be used for emphasis in electronic documents/slides; italics and bold should be used instead
Underlining is for hyperlinks or emphasis in a hand-written document

En dash (the short one: -) is used for number ranges (1990-2000) and compound adjectives (New York-London flight)
Em dash (the longer one: —) is used for parenthetical phrases—like this

In general it is a good idea to only have a few different fonts or font sizes on a single slide

If you’re not sure of a title, just go with ‘Client name’ and ‘Discussion materials’²
We’re assuming a business context here; if it’s not a business context, you can replace the client name with whatever you audience is called
There should be a date on the front page. If the exact date e.g. 3 March 2025 is too specific, just use the month and the year

A footnote should be in very small font at the bottom of the relevant slide³
Footnotes are in prose and so they should have a full-stop at the end (period in American English)

Quality beats quantity in the same sense as ‘if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter’⁴
Detail is usually dependent on context e.g. an RfP response or a presentation which is likely to be forwarded on and read as a document—rather than presented—lacks a voice-over and so the required contents has to be covered in the slides

Run spellcheck
If you have sufficient time, going away and doing something else and then coming back to the presentation to review it may help you to review it with fresh eyes
When reviewing documents of any kind it is best to do so somewhere free of distractions where you can focus on the document at hand, if possible. Within an office environment an unused meeting room or call booth is ideal for this
If the presentation is particularly important, e.g. an RfP response, there is no substitute IMHO for printing off a hard copy and carefully reading it line by line, making corrections in ink or pencil
- See here for a good guide to copy editing marks: https://www.csuchico.edu/style-guide/guidelines/copy-editing-marks.shtml

The exception to this is the New York Times style title: ‘A happened. Then B happened’. As that would not make much sense in a presentation, we can ignore this edge case.↩
And if you are not discussing the slides with anyone, slides may not be necessary?↩
My preferred way to do footnotes is to have a superscript number between brackets in the text like this: $^{(1)}$ . Then at the bottom of the slide in very small font: ‘(1): This is the related note text.’↩
Apparently in “Lettres Provinciales” (Provincial Letters) in 1657, Pascal wrote: “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte” which translates to “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter”.↩