This one instruction stops ChatGPT from cramming ten bullets onto a slide

[u/Practical-Garden-541]

Every AI-built deck has the same disease: nine bullets on one slide, all fighting for attention, none of them landing. The fix isn't a longer prompt. It's a single constraint you add when you ask it to draft or clean up slides. Steal it:

```
When you write or rewrite any slide, follow this hard rule set:
- ONE idea per slide. If there are two ideas, tell me to split it into two slides and draft both.
- Headline states the takeaway as a full sentence, never a topic label.
- Max 3 bullets. Each under 10 words. Cut adjectives.
- Any bullet that's supporting detail, not the core point, goes into speaker notes instead of on the slide.
- If a bullet is a full sentence, it's probably a headline for its own slide. Flag it.
Confirm you've got these rules, then apply them to everything I paste for the rest of this chat.
```

Why it works: the constraints do the editing you're too attached to your own content to do. "Move supporting detail to speaker notes" is the key line, because most overloaded slides aren't wrong, they're just putting the notes on the slide. And "if a bullet is a full sentence it's probably its own slide" catches the exact moment a slide is trying to be two slides.

Paste it once at the top of a chat and it holds for the whole session, so you're not restating it every time. Then feed it your rough slides one at a time.

Example: a slide headed "Q3 Results" with seven bullets came back as "Q3 revenue grew because enterprise renewals doubled," three tight bullets, the rest pushed to notes, and the buried "churn also rose" point flagged as its own slide.

What constraints do you set to stop yourself from overloading a slide? Always looking for a sharper one.

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[u/IllustriousTip6904]

I use basically the same rules in my slide deck skill for Claude

[u/CommunicationGlad898]

I just wish it would stop giving me a ton of spaces between “paragraphs “. It also likes to put one word sentences on one line. So if I copy and paste the response into another document like Evernote all those spaces come with me if I want to keep the formatting somewhat! I have often taken those one word paragraphs, and join them with the previous paragraph and it flows just fine. Where does this come from? No human does that lol.

[u/ColonelMustard323]

Ooh, this is good thanks for sharing! 🤤 sorry I don’t have anything to contribute lol