Avoiding generated-looking output
A file can pass every mechanical check and still read as machine-made. These are the tells.
Visual
- A purple-to-blue gradient on white. It is the single most recognisable marker.
- Three cards under every heading regardless of whether there are three ideas.
- An emoji in front of each bullet.
- A drop shadow on everything, so nothing stands out.
- Four accent colours, each meaning nothing in particular.
- Centred body text.
- Uniform density from first slide to last, with no rest anywhere.
Textual
- Openings like "In today's fast-paced world" or 「現代のビジネス環境において」.
- Every bullet the same length and the same grammatical shape.
- Topic-only headings with no point behind them. Keep the storyboard assertion explicit, but do not force it verbatim into the visible heading: a business deck may use the noun phrase 「鍵の管理」 and place 「鍵は保管しない」 in the lead. Avoid repetitive sentence titles that all end in 「〜する」 unless the cadence is intentional.
- Filler adjectives: 革新的, シームレス, 強力な.
- Restating the heading as the first sentence.
- A closing summary that repeats what was just read.
- Confident claims with no source. If it matters, cite it; if it cannot be cited, mark it as an opinion.
Structural
- Exactly three of everything.
- A slide per bullet point of an outline, with no editing pass.
- Sections in the order they were thought of rather than the order the reader needs.
- Introduction, body, conclusion applied to something that is really a comparison.
What helps
- Start from the point. Put the conclusion where the reader arrives first.
- Vary density on purpose. A single-sentence slide after a dense one gives the argument a beat.
- Let the count come from the content. Two ideas mean two cards.
- Name the concrete thing: 「2026-08 に実測」 beats 「最近の検証によると」.
- Include something that cost the author effort — a measurement, a failure, a number. That is what a generator cannot produce.
- Read the first and last lines alone. If they could open and close any document on any topic, rewrite them.
Before shipping
- Would this be recognisable as being about this topic with the title removed?
- Is there one sentence a reader will remember?
- Does any slide exist only because the outline had a heading there?
- Does every colour mean something?