An article by Carmine Gallo at Inc. on August 19, 2022 is titled A simple PowerPoint rule to wow your audience, and subtitled Follow the “10-40 Rule” to create slides with less text and more pictures.
He notes that the average PowerPoint slide contains 40 words. The one shown above has 65 words. Its text is the first paragraph from his article (and first sentence from the second paragraph). As a stand-alone document it explains the accompanying image.
But for a presentation you only need the headline (seven words) shown above, since you can tell the audience the rest. Mr. Gallo says that your first ten slides should contain a total of forty words (or less). He says he got that limit by looking at Steve Jobs most famous keynote speeches. You can see that in a YouTube video of the 2007 presentation introducing the iPhone.
But how should you choose those words? Back on February 19, 2014 I blogged about how Assertion-Evidence PowerPoint slides are a visual alternative to bullet point lists. Michael Alley says the headline (assertion) statement should take up just two lines.
I don’t like Mr. Gallo calling it the 10-40 rule because 10-codes were used long ago by police as shorthand in radio communication. The 1967 Association of Public Communication Officers (APCO) Project 2 defines 10-40 to mean a Silent run – no light or siren.
Back on September 23, 2019 I had blogged about arbitrary rules for How many words should be on a PowerPoint slide: 6, 12, 20, 25, 36, or 49?
The image of Lake Mead at Hoover Dam came from Wikimedia Commons.
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