No one is reading your fucking slides
Delivering a presentation? No one is reading your fucking slides.
Running a Zoom meeting with a captive audience to show off how your department is doing? No one is reading your fucking slides.
Wrote a story in Google Slides about how great revenue and churn are because of your team’s heroic efforts to become the greatest thing on the planet? No one is reading your fucking slides.
You even have a doc or notecards next to you with bullet points for your presentation. Jesus. You aren’t reading your fucking slides.
And look, it’s not totally your fault. A lot of these presentations happen over Zoom. While you’re talking, everyone is doing literally anything else besides reading your fucking slides.
Here’s the secret though. This isn’t a tragedy. It’s normal. They’re distracted. Don’t fight this. Embrace it. In every modern meeting, everyone has a little modern Lite-Brite firing new messages at 5 Hz all day long. ping. pong. Did you see this TikTok of the UPS lady who… Over that? No one is going to read your fucking slides.
(oh sorry that’s just Melissa Mccarthy)
So what do you do about it?
Easiest fix. Just don’t write slides. No one struggles to read or ignore something that doesn’t even exist. That alone levels up whatever you’re presenting.
But slides can actually shine if you take a different perspective on them.
0–6 words per slide. One phrase. One image. That’s it. Yes, you need to change slides more often. But you know why TikTok and Reels and Instagram are so addictive? We like change. Quick slides create change. Now you have a feed of ideas that at least stands a chance at competing with the doomscroll. Probably not. But hey, maybe now someone is actually looking up at you.
And make that text huge. People already aren’t reading your slides, but even if they tried, they couldn’t. No one can read a paragraph over Zoom. They can’t read them in an auditorium either. They can’t read them on a bus. They can’t read them in a rush. They can’t read them anywhere.
Ideally, you stop using words entirely. You’re already using words to talk. Give people something visually interesting that isn’t text. Ever seen a Seth Godin presentation? Masterclass. He’s got a gajillion slides. Barely anything to read. Just weird, funny images that punctuate what he’s saying.
Want to make a boring movie? Add a voiceover explaining everything. Show. Don’t tell. Classic movie advice. Let the visuals poke at people’s curiosity. A graph that makes someone think, wtf, how can this be!? Great. Now they’re listening.
Your pacing matters more than your slides. Want more attention? Change how you talk. Are you droning in long run-on sentences? Stop. Go short. Change it up. Use triplets like I just did to build patterns and rhythm. Then break it.
You should feel confident that even if the slides never appear, you’re going to capture some people just with your voice and timing.
Now, as a disclaimer, I should remind you of the rule that anyone writing a blog post advising against X is himself the worst Xer there is.
James Somers
But Nate! Who are you to offer this opinion? Because I’m not reading your fucking slides. Also no one is reading my fucking slides. I’ve made this mistake myself. Still do. But these days I think my slide game is much tighter. I’ve watched enough Seth Godin to know better.
Do that and maybe. Just maybe. Someone will look up from their Lite-Brite.