The slide written for the wrong audience

Here’s how it happens — and I’ve done it myself. The objectives get lifted straight from the needs assessment. But that text was written in the third person — “upon completion, participants will be able to…” — to persuade a reviewer that the activity meets criteria, about a learner who wasn’t in the room. Then we paste it onto a slide and show it to the learner, who very much is. No wonder it reads like fine print. It was written as fine print.

The fix is small. Rewrite the objectives as the real questions the talk will answer, in plain language, for the person in the seat: “When do you escalate? What do you do when the first-line option fails?” Same requirement met, same ground covered — but now the slide previews something the audience wants, instead of reciting compliance language at them.

It costs about five minutes, and it turns a dead slide into a promise — the difference between checking a box and earning the next twenty minutes.