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This chapter is all about the words in your deck—what they should be, where they should be, and how they should change depending on your audience and environment. By paying attention to things like the voice and writing style of your text, you’ll build a pitch deck that creates an experience that reflects your brand. The text in your deck must also do one more thing: communicate the data and evidence that will overcome doubt and push someone to action.
Key Elements:
• Writing style
• Voice and tone
• Format
• When words are not enough
Writing Style
Every communication medium carries a certain style with it. You write a love letter differently than you would write web copy or a legal contract. Pitch decks carry their own unique style, too, and that style has a lot to do with your audience, and where, when, and how they will see your deck.
Writing Style for Presentation Decks
A deck used as a visual aid during a presentation should have very few words—no more than one sentence per slide. Presentation decks also don’t need to have complete sentences. Often, one word or a short phrase is enough to introduce the idea that you will carry forward. If you have already completed your reading deck, try deleting every word in it except for the headers and see if the words give enough context to still understand what the slide is about.
Writing Style for Reading Decks
With decks you plan to send to others to read, the slides have to do a lot of work to communicate everything you would have said in person. Your words have to catch their attention quickly, clearly communicate the basic point you want to put forth, back that point up with evidence, and then move on. Watch out for sentences that sound impressive but mean nothing. “We plan to pursue an effective marketing strategy” is a waste of time to read. If you create a slide for your marketing strategy, put the words “Marketing Strategy” in the corner and then write out your strategy in a sentence of fifteen words or less. If your strategy has multiple phases, create headings that describe each phase and then add short, straightforward explanations after those headings. Reading decks should also be “scanning” decks. If I only have fifteen seconds to look through the whole thing, I should still be able to get a pretty good idea of what it is about.
George Orwell’s Rules for Writing
George Orwell, the famous author of Animal Farm and 1984, wrote a list of rules for writing in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Treat these six rules as your bible; they will make you a significantly better writer overnight.
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive [“was saved”] where you can use the active [“saved”].
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Voice and Tone
Voice and tone show the personality of your deck. If Amazon wanted to publish your pitch deck as an audio book, who would it get to read it? James Earl Jones? Tina Fey? Justin Timberlake? How do you want people to feel when they are reading your deck? Should they be smiling? Should their brows be furrowed with passion or intense concentration? You have the power to decide what experience your audience has with the kind of voice and tone you use.
Word Choice
To establish your voice and tone, start with the words you choose. Are they formal or informal? Do you use a lot of words that end with the “shun” sound (execution, completion, formation)? Do you want to use slang?
Sentence Structure
Take a look at the punctuation we use in this book. We have a lot of shorter, simple sentences that only communicate one idea at a time. Sometimes, we add in asides using em dashes—like we’re doing now—or commas that make the sentence sound more conversational.
Metaphors and Imagery
What do people see in their heads when they read your words? Should you use military metaphors (like “capture the first beachhead”) or organic metaphors (like “plant and grow new markets”)?
Format
When you first saw the previous page, one of the things you likely noticed right way was “Voice and Tone” in big letters. You knew that this section was going to have something to do with voice and tone because the way the copy was arranged told you that. You also knew that a concept like word choice was related to voice and tone, probably as one aspect of voice and tone. You knew that because the phrase “Word Choice” was placed in bold, on its own line, in a font size that is bigger than the rest of the text but smaller than the heading “Voice and Tone.” You can make all of these conclusions because of the formatting of the text on the page.
Formatting is the appearance of the design or layout of the actual words on the page and within a paragraph or sentence. Your formatting will change slightly for your presentation deck and your reading deck.
Common Formatting for Reading Decks
• Capture the audience’s attention in the top third of the slide. Use titles or short phrases to give just enough information for someone to understand what the slide is about in less than three seconds.
• Reading decks often contain three content elements: a title, a short phrase or sentence laying out the core argument of the slide, and a larger 1–3 sentence paragraph with further explanation or evidence.
• Word economy still matters. Use as few words as possible.
• Think graphic novel.
Common Formatting for Presentation Decks
• The fewer the words, the better. Limit each slide to ten words max. Who says you need any text at all?
• If you are not sure about whether to include something, imagine you are a grandparent and are trying to read the slides from the very back of the room.
• If you already created your reading deck, start your presentation deck by deleting every word except the title.
• Think Steve Jobs.
When Words Are Not Enough
One of Walt Disney’s dreams was to have rides where live animals interacted in close proximity with the guests. Imagine the experience of a real safari—elephants and giraffes so close to you that you could see the individual strands of their fur. But there were too many technical and safety obstacles, so he had to settle for those goofy animatronic animals. Fast forward a half-century. Michael Eisner, now CEO of Disney, was participating in the last round of discussions for a soon-to-be-built new theme park: Magic Kingdom. Finally, Walt’s dream might be realized. But Eisner couldn’t see what the big deal was. What’s so special about a live animal?
Joe Rhode, the lead Imagineer on the project, gave the final pitch to the Disney executives. “We know that there are concerns about whether animals are, in and of themselves, dramatic,” he began.
“The heart of the Animal Kingdom park is animals, and our guests’ encounters with them. We have gone to great lengths to make sure that the animals will be displayed in a way that will bring them and people together as never before . . . ,” he continued.
Then a door opened and in walked a 400-pound Bengal tiger. While Rhode continued his presentation as if nothing had happened, the tiger walked around the table, sniffing the bewildered executives.
End of discussion.
Your evidence will not speak for itself. You must find ways to make that evidence compelling and real to your audience.
For example, Freight Farms, an agricultural startup that turns used shipping containers into automated hydroponic farms, would always bring investors into a freight farm before it asked them to invest. Paradigm, a social business that sells highly efficient stoves to women in the developing world, would tie a huge bundle of sticks together—the same size that a women in a developing country would carry for miles to use for fuel—and would challenge investors to try to carry it on their backs. Many couldn’t.
What will create a visceral experience in the minds of your audience? What will make them feel the power of what you are doing and motivate them to do something about it? Can you imagine, as an investor, seeing this walk into the room?
Enough said.
How to Start Your Deck
1. Draw ten rectangles and put the name of each slide at the top.
Divide a whiteboard or a piece of paper into ten rectangles and treat each rectangle as a slide. Put the titles of each slide at the top. Then, sketch out the storyline of your pitch in words and pictures. The image to the right is a photo of one of our original outlines of the pitch deck for this book.
2. Tweet the big ideas
Turn the ten building blocks into a Twitter-size phrase that describes that aspect of your venture. You can also use visuals to describe each aspect.
3. Ask yourself: If I were to insert my most compelling story about my venture, what story would I tell?
Use that story to craft the arc of your deck and the order of your slides. You can open with that story to hook your audience, or you can build toward it as the climax.
How to Send Your Deck
The type of file you send as an attachment or the kind of paper you print your deck on may seem like a minor detail. It’s not. The way you send your deck dictates what kind of first impression your deck will make on others. You have invested a lot of work to get your deck ready to send to others; you don’t want all of that work wasted because they can’t open the file or are distracted by the terrible stapling.
Tips for a Printed Deck
Proper binding. Steel binding is the best and most expensive, but it can be hard to find a print shop with the machine to do it. If that is unavailable, then we recommend spiral binding. Comb binding is okay, but has a tendency to fall apart. If this sounds confusing, your local print shop will be able to set you in the right direction. Never use a staple!
Good paper. Use twenty-eight- or thirty-two-pound paper. The twenty-two- and twenty-four-pound paper feels cheap and gives you hellish paper cuts.
A full deck and a one-pager. The one-pager should contain each element of your deck but on one page for easy viewing.
Tips for a Digital Deck
PDF, not Keynote. Always convert your deck into PDF format rather than a Word, Keynote, or PowerPoint document. Editable documents are messy, don’t always open, and are much too large.
Controlled access. There’s little you can do to prevent people from sharing your deck if they really want to. Password-protecting the PDF can keep your deck from ending up in the wrong hands. You can also use docsend. com (Google Analytics for documents), which will tell you who read your deck and how long it took them.
Updates and versions. Instead of attaching your deck to an e-mail, consider hosting it on Dropbox and sending only the link in your e-mails. This way you can keep your deck updated and the investor will always see the latest version. When you save a new version, keep an archive of the old one in a separate folder so you can keep track of the changes you’ve made.