7 min read 6th Oct 2026
Please don’t read your PowerPoint slides to me
I like United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby’s rule for PowerPoint. Send him the deck in advance if you like, but his instruction for the meeting is blunt: “You’re not going to read slides to me.”
We talk about this a lot in our presentation training at Body Talk. Most of us got the hang of reading some time ago, so listening to someone recite the bullet points in front of us is an interesting use of everyone’s time. You can usually see the audience reading ahead, waiting for the speaker to catch up.
Why does being read to feel like such hard work?
There’s a reason a slide readout can feel tiring even when the subject is interesting. Working memory has limited capacity, and research into the redundancy effect suggests that learning can suffer when spoken words simply duplicate a large amount of text on screen. You’re trying to listen to the speaker while reading and keeping your place on the slide. That effort leaves less room to think about what the information means. It doesn’t mean every word on a slide is a problem; a useful label or short prompt can help. The difficulty comes when the slide contains the speech and the presenter delivers it all over again. Our blog on cognitive load explores what happens when slides ask too much of an audience.
I’m sure we’ve all sat in a meeting where a new slide appears, everybody starts reading it, and the presenter begins speaking at the same time. By the time they reach the third bullet, some people are at the bottom of the slide and others are still trying to make sense of the chart tucked into the corner. The speaker may have put a great deal of work into the deck, but now they’re competing with it for the audience’s attention.
What can the speaker add?
Our job as presenters is to do more than ferry information from the slide into the room. We can help people see why it matters and, quite often, change how they feel about it. If we’re asking colleagues to support a proposal, they may need to understand the concern that prompted it before they can feel confident about the solution.
That should guide what we put on screen. A strong image can give people something to look at while we tell the story. A simple chart can reveal a pattern that would take several sentences to explain. The question I encourage people to ask is: what does my audience need to see to understand this point? Once you know the answer, you can decide what belongs on the slide and what is better coming from you.
When I presented the weather for the BBC, we didn’t start with the graphics and work out what to say afterwards. We started by understanding the forecast and deciding what viewers needed to know. The map showed the essentials at a glance; I could then explain how the weather was changing and what that meant for their plans. I’ve written more about that experience in the brain rules for visual aids, but the principle works just as well in a business presentation: find the story first, then build the visuals that help you tell it.
This doesn’t require every presenter to become a natural storyteller overnight. Think about how you explain a problem to a colleague over coffee. You probably don’t begin with six headings and read out a list of observations. You tell them what happened, give them the detail they need, and notice when they have a question. Taking the bullets off the screen and speaking to people as people is already a good start. The storytelling can develop from there.
What if people need all the detail?
Often they do. A proposal may have figures, caveats and background that people should be able to examine properly. That’s a good reason to send a document or deck ahead of time, or to provide something they can return to afterwards. It doesn’t mean every line needs to be read aloud while everyone is in the room.
This is the part of Kirby’s approach that appeals to me as much as his PowerPoint rule. If people have had a chance to look at the material, the meeting can begin with what they think about it. Which assumption worries them? What needs explaining? What decision can the group actually make? A conversation gives the presenter a chance to hear where the audience is, rather than finding out at the end of slide 27 that the concern was on slide four. Kirby describes his meetings as conversational and asks for decks in advance.
Of course, sending a deck beforehand doesn’t guarantee everyone will read it. You can still open with a brief account of the point you want to discuss and show the one visual that helps everyone get oriented. That is a different experience from spending the meeting narrating an attachment, especially for the people who did read it.
Do you need slides at all?
PowerPoint can be valuable when it shows something that words alone would struggle to convey. In our workshops, we encourage people to use one strong visual image and tell the story over it, with a few prompts if they are genuinely useful. A slide full of sentences being read word for word is essentially a teleprompter facing in the wrong direction.
Before building the next deck, it’s worth asking what you want people to understand, feel or decide when you’ve finished speaking. If an image helps them grasp the point, use it. If the information needs careful reading, give them time to read it. And if the best way forward is to tell the story and invite a discussion, you can leave the laptop closed.
Think of yourself as Batman and your slides as Robin. Robin can be a great help to the story, but Batman has managed some pretty good work on his own.
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