A creative director I once sat in on told her team to "kill every bullet point in the deck" before a board review. Two days later, half the slides had no bullets — and were harder to follow than before. Turning off a format didn't fix the deck. It just moved the confusion somewhere else.

That's the part missing from most "bullet points are dead" articles. The claim gets repeated so often it sounds settled. It isn't.

The rumor everyone repeats and rarely checks

The most-cited evidence against bullet points traces back to a 2014 study in the International Journal of Business Communication, which found that audiences paid more attention to, agreed more with, and remembered a strategy better when it was shown as a graphic rather than a bulleted list carrying the same words. Cognitive psychologist Chris Atherton ran a related comparison in 2012, testing traditional bullet-heavy slides against sparser alternatives — and found no significant difference in immediate multiple-choice recall between the two groups, even though the sparse-slide group showed more nuanced advantages elsewhere.

Notice what that second result already complicates: "no significant difference" isn't the same headline as "bullets kill your presentation." Most blog posts on this topic keep the first study and quietly drop the second.

Then a newer study made it messier

A 2025 pilot study by SlideSource split 91 participants into three groups — no slides, bullet-point slides, and image-driven slides — watching the same presentation. Both slide formats modestly improved engagement over no slides at all. But when it came to remembering specific details afterward, bullet points actually outperformed image-heavy slides.

That's the opposite of what a "bullets are dead" headline promises. It doesn't mean bullets are secretly great — the same researchers still recommend pairing them strategically with visuals rather than defaulting to either one. But it does mean the format isn't the villain by itself. What the format is used for matters more than whether it exists on the slide at all.

What's actually dying isn't the bullet — it's the decorative list

Look at how consulting firms build decks and the picture gets sharper. The way McKinsey approaches slide design isn't built around banning bullets — it's built around writing the argument as a sequence of claim-driven titles before any layout happens. A bullet under a title like "Regional sales grew despite a weaker product mix" is doing evidence work. A bullet under a title like "Regional Sales Performance" is doing decoration work, because the title isn't carrying any information the bullets aren't already repeating.

That distinction rarely survives into "kill your bullets" advice, which treats the format itself as the problem instead of asking what job each line was supposed to be doing.

Cutting bullets doesn't automatically mean you thought harder

There's a trap on the other side of this, too. Deleting bullet points to look modern can produce a slide that looks confident and says nothing — a single vague headline standing in for evidence that used to be there. The line between minimalist and merely empty comes down to a blunt test: would the point survive being said out loud with nothing else on the slide? If not, removing the bullets didn't simplify anything — it just hid the gap where the thinking should have been.

I wouldn't recommend treating "fewer bullets" as a proxy for "better slide." Sometimes six tight bullet points are the argument. Sometimes one bullet is padding a slide that needed a chart instead.

So is the format changing forever?

Some of it is, but not the way the "bullets are dead" headlines frame it. Teams spend a real, measurable chunk of their week on this stuff — a global survey by presentation-software company empower found that formatting tasks like building and adjusting charts, tables, and slide layouts add up to roughly 2.6 hours per week for the average employee. None of that time is spent deciding whether a line deserves a bullet. It's spent on spacing, rebuilding a chart that broke, matching a template that doesn't quite fit the content. Consistent structure decided in advance — one idea per slide, a chart matched to the actual comparison being made, hierarchy locked before content gets dropped in — claws back more of that time than deleting bullet points ever will.

What's actually shifting is the order of operations: fewer people building slides by dropping bullets onto a blank layout and hoping a structure emerges, more people deciding the argument first and treating bullets, charts, or a single stark number as interchangeable tools for delivering it.

Next time someone tells you to cut the bullets, ask them what should replace the thinking those bullets were supposed to represent — not just the punctuation.