How to write action titles for slides

Topic titles versus action titles

A topic title names the subject. An action title makes a claim about it. Here are the same slides written both ways.

Read the right column on its own. You already know something about each slide before you’ve seen a chart. Read the left column and you know nothing, except what the slide is filed under.

Notice that the action titles aren’t longer for the sake of it. Each one carries a verb and a result. That’s what makes it a claim, and a claim is something your reader can agree with, argue with or act on.

Why it works

Your reader is busy and has to get the point in seconds. A partner flipping through 30 slides before a meeting does not study charts. With action titles, you make sure that they still walk away with your key messages in mind.

It also changes how your deck reads as a whole. Take any deck, copy only the titles into a blank document and read them top to bottom. We call this the skim test. If the titles form a story, with a start, a reason and a recommendation, the deck works. If they read like a table of contents, it doesn’t, and no amount of polish on the charts will fix that.

Try it on this sequence from a sales review:

1. Revenue grew 12% year over year, but only in two regions
2. Win rates fall by half once a deal passes 90 days
3. Shortening the sales cycle is worth more than adding headcount
4. We propose a 30-day qualification gate in all regions

Four titles, one argument, and the executive who only has two minutes just got the whole thing. The slides underneath are there for the person who wants to check your work.

The skim test helps you too. You’ll find the weak slide before anyone else does, because it’s the one whose action title you can’t write.

How to write an action title

Start with one message per slide. If you need “and” to join two separate findings, you have two slides. Splitting feels wasteful until you see how much easier each one is to read.

Write a full sentence with a verb. “Costs down” is a fragment. “Logistics costs fell 9% after we consolidated warehouses” is a title. The verb forces you to commit to what happened, and the commitment is what your reader came for.

Put the number in when you have one. “Churn improved” is vague and invites the question “by how much?”, while “Churn fell from 6% to 3%” answers it before it’s asked. Use your real figure, and if you don’t have one yet, find out before you write the slide.

Make the body prove the title. Everything on the slide should support the claim in the headline. A chart that shows something else, or a second chart that tells a different story, belongs on another slide. When you finish a slide, ask: does a skeptical reader look at this and say “yes, that’s what it shows”?

Keep it to two lines. Two lines at a normal title size is roughly 15 to 20 words. Past that, you’re writing a paragraph. Cut the throat-clearing (“It is worth noting that”), cut the hedges, and move the detail into the body. If it still doesn’t fit, you probably have two messages.

Write the title first. Plenty of people build the chart, then wonder what to call it. Try the opposite. Write the sentence you want the reader to believe, then build whatever proves it. If the data doesn’t back the sentence, you’ve learned that early, which beats learning it in the meeting.

Examples for some typical decks

By now, you should have quite a good idea of what a good action title looks like. Here are some more examples to back that up.

Sales review

• Weak: Pipeline overview
• Strong: Pipeline coverage is 2.1x, below the 3x we need to hit the year

Market sizing

• Weak: Total addressable market
• Strong: Serving only the top 500 accounts already makes this a 120 million dollar market

Investor pitch

• Weak: Our traction
• Strong: Monthly active users tripled in six months with no paid marketing

Board deck

• Weak: Hiring
• Strong: Engineering is understaffed by four people, putting launch in Q2 at risk

Student case competition

• Weak: Recommendation
• Strong: Enter Brazil through a local distributor to reach profitability in year one

Every strong version could be pasted into an email and still make sense. That’s a good test for any title you write.

Common mistakes

A topic dressed up as a sentence. “An analysis of customer churn drivers” has no claim in it. If there is no claim or observation in it, it isn’t an action title.

Two messages in one title. “Revenue is up by 12% and we need to speed up hiring” is two slides squeezed into one. Pick the message that matters for this slide and give the other one its own.

A title the slide doesn’t prove. If the headline says margins are shrinking and the chart shows revenue, readers will trust neither. Match them or change one.

Vague verbs. “Costs are impacted by several factors” says nothing. Which factors? Which direction? Aim for verbs you could draw: rise, fall, double, stall, overtake, miss.

Titles that run to four lines. Long titles often hide a muddy idea. Try saying the point out loud in one breath. If you can’t, you don’t have a clear message that deserves a slide yet.

Inconsistent style. Mixing sentence case and title case, or periods on some titles and not others, makes the deck look unplanned. Pick a style and keep it.

When a plain label is fine

Not every slide needs an action title. Use a plain label for:

• The title slide
• Section dividers
• The agenda or table of contents

Even then, the rest of the deck should carry the story. If your agenda slide is the only thing explaining where you’re going, the real titles aren’t doing their job.

Check them all at once

When the deck is drafted, run the skim test properly.

1. Switch to outline view with ⌘4 to see the titles in order.
2. Read them out loud. Do they tell a story, or do they list topics?
3. Mark every title that has no verb or no claim.
4. For each, ask: what is the one thing I want the reader to take from this slide? Write that sentence.
5. Check that the body proves it. If not, fix the slide or fix the title.

Then look at the slides themselves. Rewriting 30 titles is easy compared with what comes after: working out all the content, making the layout consistent across slides, adding visuals, and making sure everything is still perfectly aligned after the whole team has made their edits. That cleanup is where Slideturbo helps. It’s a free add-in for PowerPoint on Mac with keyboard shortcuts for aligning, distributing and formatting, plus visual elements like Harvey balls that you add with a couple of keystrokes. Use Slideturbo for the busywork so that you can spend your time on good action titles and content.

Start with your next slide

Pick the slide you’re working on today. Write down the one thing you want the reader to believe after seeing it, put a verb and a number in the sentence, and make that the action title. Then do the next one.

Once you’re done, download Slideturbo and get the layout work and formatting out of your way. And if you want more practical guides like this one, join the newsletter.