Note: If your student group or class would like a workshop on these methods, contact us at checinfo@cornell.edu .

Too many technical speakers use slides that have fragmented headers. Using fragments makes your work appear disjointed and unorganized.

Instead, use a very short, full sentence at the top of your slide. Doing so is a powerful move. It turns your fragmented thought into a focused summary of a solid technical point. Here’s a quick example.

On the left, we see a poorly crafted header. On the right, the revised header is actually useful to the audience.

Poor practice (on the left) is hinting at a subject, while stronger practice actually reveals your subject. But here’s the trick:  keep it short!  Engineering is about efficiencies and elegance in design.  This idea is true for your slides, too.

The idea of using a sentence for the header is a proven technique, and science supports it. Learn more about the technique and its background at a partner site, assertion-evidence.com .

Much, much more can be found about this technique in the book Slide Rules: Design, Build, and Archive Presentations in the Engineering and Technical Fields. It is available in the library and in e-book formats.