This article appears in The Best of the 2023 Teaching Professor Conference (Magna Publications, 2023).

All the world’s a stage—particularly your seated, online, or hybrid classroom, where slides can set the scene, provide drama, and sing backing vocals. Unfortunately, many faculty matriculated in an era when wordy, bullet-laden PowerPoints were abundant, and too often, we bring poor slides to our classrooms. For many, the stage set by our slides suffers from numerous pitfalls. Fortunately, impactful, student-focused slides can be generated or quickly modified by understanding and planning in three areas: subvocalization, cognitive load, and dual coding.