Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-08-12
Build a class presentation outline that actually fits your time slot, with speaker notes you won't just read off the slide
Turns your topic and research notes into a slide-by-slide outline with a real time budget per section and speaker notes written to be spoken, not slide text repeated out loud.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Build me a presentation outline for a class assignment, budgeted to my actual time limit, with speaker notes that add to the slides instead of repeating them. ASSIGNMENT Explaining the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, for AP Macroeconomics. TIME LIMIT 6 minutes, plus 2 minutes for questions. MY RESEARCH / KEY POINTS SO FAR Subprime mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, credit rating agency failures, Lehman Brothers collapse, TARP bailout. WHAT I HAVE TO INCLUDE (grading requirements) Must cite at least two causes with supporting evidence, must include one visual/chart, must state one lasting policy change. Build the outline slide by slide, and assign each slide a specific time budget in seconds or minutes that sums to my total time limit, not a generic "intro/body/conclusion" split — front-load the requirements from the grading criteria into the slides where they'll get the most visible weight, since a grader skimming for specific criteria should be able to find them without hunting. For each slide, give: a short slide title, 2-4 bullet points of what actually appears on the slide (kept short — a slide is a visual aid, not a script), and separate speaker notes written as what I'd actually say out loud, which must add context, an example, or a transition the bullets don't already say rather than just reading the bullets back in sentence form. Flag any slide where my research notes don't give you enough to fill the time budget, rather than padding the speaker notes with filler to hit the time. After the outline, do a total time check: add up the per-slide budgets and confirm they match my stated limit, and if my research notes are thin relative to the time limit, say so directly and suggest either where to add more depth or whether to trim the limit's use elsewhere (like question-buffer time) instead of stretching thin content. Output as: (1) slide-by-slide outline with time budgets, bullets, and speaker notes, (2) the total time check, (3) a one-line list of any grading requirements you weren't given enough detail to address.
Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Asked for a presentation outline without a time budget, GPT-5.1 tends to produce a roughly even three-act structure regardless of your actual time limit, because "intro/body/conclusion" is the default presentation shape in its training distribution and it has no forcing function to size each section against a real constraint — assigning explicit per-slide time budgets that must sum to your stated limit turns an aesthetic structure into an arithmetic one the model has to satisfy, which is what actually prevents the common student failure of running eight minutes over on a six-minute slot. Explicitly separating slide bullets from speaker notes and requiring the notes to add something the bullets don't targets a specific, very common AI-generated-presentation failure: without that instruction, the model tends to write speaker notes that are just the bullet points rephrased into full sentences, which produces the exact "reading the slide out loud" delivery style that presentation rubrics penalize and that makes a talk boring to sit through regardless of content quality. The instruction to flag thin sections rather than pad them with filler matters because a model under an implicit "fill this time slot" pressure will generate plausible-sounding elaboration to hit a duration target even when your actual research doesn't support that much content, and presenting padded, low-density material for two extra minutes reads as worse to a grader than an honest, tighter presentation that ends slightly early — the model flagging the gap gives you the chance to actually research more or trim the ask, instead of unknowingly walking in with a presentation that thins out under audience questions.
What you get back
Slide 3 — Mortgage-Backed Securities (60 sec) Bullets: Bundled subprime loans sold as securities; rating agencies mislabeled risk; banks held concentrated exposure. Speaker notes: Here's the part that surprises people — these securities got top ratings from agencies who were paid by the same banks issuing them, which is a conflict of interest worth pointing out explicitly since it's a common follow-up question. Transition: that mislabeled risk is exactly what turned a housing problem into a banking-system problem, which is where Lehman comes in.
Verified against
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-08-12
Changelog
- 2026-08-12 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT GPT-5.1.
Need this built into your business?
If a prompt isn't enough — what Scult builds, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.
EXPLORE WHAT SCULT BUILDS
