presentations language exercise

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• Presentations

Language for presentations Some formulaic phrases

On this page you will find some language for presentations, also known as 'signpost' phrases. Many of these are similar to (or the same as) the lecture cues a lecturer uses. They are another example of the formulaic language used in academic contexts. You do not need to learn all of these phrases. Your basic aim is to be able to use at least one phrase for each function (e.g. expressing purpose and showing the structure in the introduction , using transitions between sections, referring to visual aids , concluding ).

How many more you learn after this is up to you. Presentations usually have many visual aids and transitions, so it would be useful to learn two or three different phrases for these functions. On the other hand, you will only state the purpose once in a presentation, so one phrase is enough for life!

Introductions

The introduction is a crucial part of any presentation. There are many functions which you need to achieve:

• greet the audience
• express your purpose
• give the structure
• give the timing
• handle questions

Phrases for all of these are given in the box to the right.

 Greeting the audience

• Good morning/afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
• Good morning/afternoon, everyone.

 Expressing the purpose

• My purpose/objective/aim today is...
• What I want to do this morning/afternoon/today is...
• I'm here today to...

 Giving the structure

• This talk is divided into four main parts.
• To start with/Firstly, I'd like to look at...
• Then/Secondly, I'll be talking about...
• My fourth point will be about...
• Finally, I'll be looking at...

 Giving the timing

• My presentation/talk/lecture will take/last about 20 minutes.

 Handling questions

• At the end of my talk, there will be a chance to ask questions.
• I'll be happy to answer any questions you have at the end of my presentation.

Visual aids

It is important to be able to refer to your visual aids appropriately. Some useful phrases for visuals are shown to the right.

 Visual aids

• As you can see here...
• Here we can see...
• If we look at this slide...
• This slide shows...
• If you look at the screen, you'll see...
• This table/diagram/chart/slide shows...
• I'd like you to look at this...
• Let me show you...
• Let's (have a) look at...
• On the right/left you can see...

A vital part of any presentation is 'transitioning' (moving on) to a new section. Why is this so crucial? Mainly because of the difference between listening and reading. When you are reading, you can easily see where one section (or paragraph) ends, and another begins. This is not true when you are listening. To help with this, good academic speakers, whether in presentations or lectures , give cues to signal the end of a section. This helps the listener understand the structure and follow the main points.

Some useful transition phrases are shown to the right.

 Transitions

• Let's now move on to/turn to...
• I now want to go on to...
• This leads/brings me to my next point, which is...
• I'd now like to move on to/turn to...
• So far we have looked at... Now I'd like to...

Other phrases

There are some other phrases which are useful in a presentation. These include giving examples, summarising a point or section, and making a digression.

 Giving examples

• Let me give you an example...
• for instance...
• A good example of this is...

 Summarising

• What I'm trying to say is...
• Let me just try and sum that up before we move on to...
• So far, I've presented...

 Digressing

• I might just mention...
• Incidentally...

The conclusion, like the introduction, has several functions which you need to achieve:

• sum up the main points of the presentation
• conclude (by giving a 'take-away' message)
• close (by thanking the audience)
• invite questions

 Summing up

• Summing up...
• To summarise...
• So, to sum up...
• To recap...
• Let me now sum up.

 Concluding

• Let me end by saying...
• I'd like to finish by emphasising...
• In conclusion I'd like to say...
• Finally, may I say...
• Thank you for your attention/time.
• Thank you (for listening/very much).
• If you have any questions or comments, I'll be happy to answer them now.
• If there are any questions, I'll do my best to answer them.
• Are there any more questions?

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Below is a checklist for presentation language. Use it to help you prepare. You can download a copy of the checklist from the speaking resources page .

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Presentations

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LESSON PLAN FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS

Level: Intermediate (B1-B2)

Type of English: Business English

Tags: meetings visual aids giving a presentation Situation based

Publication date: 07/20/2021

Students briefly discuss their own experiences of presentations before identifying types of diagrams often used in presentations and their functions. They listen to a business presentation and identify and practise a range of functional language for structuring presentations. The lesson includes vocabulary development and a presentation activity which can be extended to include preparation of slides with visual aids. Students should prepare and practise their presentation as homework and deliver it in another lesson. The materials also include an optional extension activity relating to what can go wrong with a presentation.

by Stephanie Hirschman

presentation_BrE.mp3

very useful to enhance my students' listening skill

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Students briefly discuss their own experiences with presentations before identifying types of diagrams often used in presentations and their functions. They listen to a business presentation and identify and practice a range of functional language for structuring presentations. The lesson includes vocabulary development and a presentation activity which can be extended to include preparation of slides with visual aids. Students should prepare and practice their presentation as homework and deliver it in another lesson. The materials also include an optional extension activity relating to what can go wrong with a presentation.

presentations_AmE.mp3

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• 10 public speaking exercises

Public speaking practice exercises:

- the top 10 to tuck into your toolkit.

By:  Susan Dugdale  

Here's a collection of public speaking practice exercises covering the principal elements often requiring specific and sustained work. (Competency is an ongoing journey!)

The 10 aspects are:

• breathing ,
• vocal warmups for: face, jaw, lips, and throat,
• using video to become conscious of any habitual unhelpful gestures we may make as we present,
• recording ourselves  to hear our voices as others hear us,
• eye contact ,
• sounding real (becoming congruent) ,
• speech rate ,
• articulation ,
• body language ,
• and planning to succeed .

The exercises are simple, easily put into practice and will help you deliver your presentations more effectively. 

Make them part of your regular preparation routine and you'll be delighted with the increased poise, confidence, and control you develop. ☺

1. Breathe!

The first of these public speaking practice exercises focuses on breath because in order to speak well, we need to breathe well and that means fully using the lungs.

Being anxious or nervous is often expressed through shallow breathing which in turn affects the voice. It pushes the tone up, reducing its range and effectiveness.

• Stand with your feet a comfortable shoulder width apart.
• Support the weight of your body through your hips and legs rather than locking your knees.
• Consciously release and relax your shoulders.
• If you're holding your stomach in, let it go.
• Place your hands on your stomach. When you are breathing well your hands will rise on an in-breath and fall on an out-breath.
• Breathe in through your nose to the count of 4. Count slowly: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4. As you inhale feel your diaphragm, and see your hands, rising.
• Breathe out through your mouth to the count of 4 and now feel your diaphragm expanding and see your hands lowering.
• Do several rounds of inhale and exhale to a 4 count while making sure you keep your shoulders, stomach and legs relaxed.
• Once you have mastered the 4 count, increase it. Through regular practice you will soon be able to extend it for a 8 or even 10 count.

Extra breathing exercises

Click the link to find more public speaking breathing exercises .

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2. Hum, ha and yawn - vocal warmups

Humming, ha-a-a-ing and yawning will help you relax and tune-up your vocal equipment. A double win!

Hum a single note, simple tune or a scale gently, making sure your lips and cheeks are relaxed. You'll feel the vibrations resonating through your face and throat.

To 'ha' take in a full breath and on the release or out breath say 'ha-a-a-a-a-a-a' gently until you run out of air. Make sure your mouth is open and relaxed. Repeat several times.

Yawning releases tension in the jaw and if you're at all anxious, this is a place you'll feel it. Let that tension go by opening your mouth and yawning widely without strain. Add sound. 'Ahhh', 'eeeee' or 'oooooo' - until all the air in your lungs is gone. Repeat until your throat and jaw are relaxed.

3. Mirror, mirror on the wall*...

Many of us get anxious about what we look like to the audience when we're giving a speech. Others of us are not aware of habitual gestures we make.

Solve the problem by looking. Video yourself while presenting.

You'll see what you do and become aware of what you want to change. It can be quite an eye-opener!

*A while ago the advice was to practice in front of a full-length mirror. A video camera is the modern version.

4. Recording yourself speaking

What's the quality of your voice?

• Do you know what you sound like?
• What is your voice doing when you are speaking?
• How does it come across?
• Have you got any verbal mannerisms you are unaware of?

A recording will let you know. You'll hear those rising inflections at the ends of sentences, ums and ahs, and whether or not you're mumbling or racing your words.

Recording yourself allows you to hear yourself as others do and that's invaluable information. If you have a recorder, use it and if you have a video camera, better still. You can combine hearing and seeing yourself.

Understand the effect of your voice

For more about the impact of your voice on other people see  voice image .

5. Eye contact in public speaking

This exercise focuses on the question: who, exactly are you speaking to when you are delivering a speech? 

It's customary, particularly in Western cultures, in an everyday conversation to make eye contact with the person we're speaking to.

It makes the conversation more meaningful for both parties. As the speaker, you feel you're being heard or listened to. As the listener, you feel you're being spoken to directly.

However ...

What happens when you give a speech to many people?

Making eye contact with members of your audience has the effect of making them feel as though you are talking to them personally. It's an acknowledgement, creating a bond for the duration of your speech, and beyond.

It works best when you spread your eye contact through the audience which means you'll meet the eyes briefly of a person in the front, then another on your right, someone on your left and then someone in the middle or back of the audience.

The contact is sufficient for them to feel spoken to directly and because you've directed your gaze left, right, and center that perception will be shared by the audience as a whole.

Practice meeting the eyes of one person for approximately 3-5 seconds, then another, and another, the next time you make a speech. You'll be amazed how much more connected to the audience you'll feel.

For more on the importance of eye contact, cultural differences, and exercises...

6. Sounding real or genuinely believable

If you're saying, "I'm really happy to be here today.", but sounding like, "I'm totally bored and can't wait to get off the stage.", your speech is going to create conflict for the audience because your words are saying one thing while your tone or expression is saying another. They are contradicting each other - not aligned, or congruent, and the people listening will be confused. Can they really trust or believe what you are saying?

• happy, then bored, then sad, try angry, now bitter, then teasing, and now, cynical.

The idea is to really listen to how you say the words, how you fill them with meaning. Ideally, there'll be noticeable differences between them.

The happy - sad difference

A happy person saying the same sentence as an unhappy one sounds different. The stresses or inflections they place on the words are different. They are spoken at a different rate and even, at a different pitch.

By playing with the way you deliver your words you'll develop more flexibility and with more flexibility you'll be more able to find the most appropriate way to express your words and have them interpreted in the way you intended.

Click the link to find more public speaking exercises for vocal variety .

7. Slowing speech rate

How fast do you speak?

A common response to feeling anxious about making a speech is to get faster and faster until the words are flying out of your mouth and become a blur in the ears of your listeners.

Curing fast through fear

The best public speaking exercise to cure 'fast through fear' is practice and a good way to do that is to consciously hear what you're saying by recording your speech.

Try saying at least a minute of it at varying speeds from very slow to very fast. Now listen to the result.

Which speed is more effective? What conveys your message and gives your audience time to hear and understand it?

Too much speed, or too little, will alienate listeners. The truth is that you need a flexible speaking rate, fitting the content (what you're saying) and the needs of the audience. Some parts of your speech will be slower and others will be faster.

More help with finding the best speech rate

Click the link for more public speaking practice exercises to help you achieve a flexible speaking rate .

Do check this page too and give yourself the power of the pause . Understanding the power of silence and how to use to it effectively will also help you bring a fast speech rate down as well as helping you to emphasize your main points clearly.

8. How to speak clearly - articulation

If you are a mumble merchant you'll have people constantly asking you to repeat yourself because they don't understand what you're saying. Blurring your words or running them together blocks communication.

To stop it you need to enunciate or articulate clearly. That means using the tip of the tongue, the teeth and the lips to shape the sounds of a word cleanly. This public speaking exercise, old fashioned tongue twisters, is designed to do just that.

Start slowly and carefully making sure each word is pronounced crisply and then practice going faster and faster.

Here's a couple to begin with.

Red leather, yellow leather... Red lorry, yellow lorry...

You know New York, You need New York, You know you need unique New York.

More articulation practice

You'll find a whole lot more tongue twister drills on this page of diction exercises .  Each focuses on different sound or letter combinations. Choose the ones you know you need to practice and have fun with them!

There's audio examples to listen to, too!

9. Body language in public speaking

In a speech, the words you say are only part of your total communication package. What makes up the rest of it is what you say non-verbally, with your body.

To be a more effective speaker the non-verbal communication, (what you do with your body while you are speaking), needs to actively complement your speech. In other words, they need to work together harmoniously!

To look confident, as well as sounding confident, practice standing tall, on both feet, in an 'at ease' position. Let your shoulders relax and breathe fully.

You can practice standing tall anywhere - in a supermarket queue, at home or at work.

Feel the difference it makes. Become aware of how empowering it is to have your head held high, to have your shoulders relaxed, to be standing on both feet.

Once you know how good and strong that feels as soon as you catch yourself slumping or hunching your shoulders, you can easily reverse it.

More about body language

Click the link to find out more about body language and how to use it in public speaking.

10. Bring it on! Planning ahead for success

A competent speaker plans ahead . They will have thought through as many possible angles of their presentation as they can. In doing so they will have identified the areas that could go wrong and will have taken steps to correct them BEFORE they can happen in reality.

So what could go side-ways in your presentation?

• Can everyone see them easily?
• If you hand them around while you are talking will that disrupt and distract from your speech?
• Would it be better to wait until you've finished?
• Have you checked for power sockets?
• Is the lead you're planning to use long enough?
• Do you need to bring a screen?
• Who is going to set the equipment up for you? No one? Have you practiced doing that for yourself?

Have you checked all the gear in the room you're going to use? The microphone? The lights? The whiteboards? (Have you got markers?)

Do you know the name of the person who is going to introduce you and where you going to meet them before your talk?

Go through your entire speech presentation looking at it from a 'what could go wrong' angle. For each possibility you discover, make a plan to meet it.

Thorough planning and preparation reduces the possibility of everything turning to chaos. Deciding to 'wing it' increases it.

Click the link to get yourself a printable 'bring-it-on' presentation checklist of items to consider and adapt it for your own use. 

The time to begin practicing is now

Please don't wait until you have to give a speech to begin practicing any of these public speaking exercises you know you need. They'll deliver benefits in all areas of your life - more confidence, more conscious control over how you present yourself.

More fun public speaking activities

Click the link to find all the many public speaking games and activities on site. Use them in a classroom, for a public speaking group, or for yourself.

And lastly, if this content was useful to you please share and 'like' it. See right to do that. Thank you. ☺

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• Vocabulary for Beginning a Presentation Level: Upper-Intermediate Vocabulary for opening a presentation and introducing its content in a clear and concise way.
• Vocabulary for Describing Data & Charts in Presentations Level: Upper-Intermediate How to describe graphs, charts and tables to an audience professionally.
• Expressing Opinion and Referring in Presentations Level: Upper-Intermediate Vocabulary for expressing your opinion in a presentation and referring to earlier parts of the presentation.
• Vocabulary for Summarizing & Finishing Presentations Level: Upper-Intermediate Vocabulary for summarizing, predicting the future and finishing in a presentation.
• How to Answer Questions in Presentations Level: Upper-Intermediate Vocabulary for answering and dealing professionally with questions from the audience.

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Home Blog Education Presentation Skills 101: A Guide to Presentation Success

Presentation Skills 101: A Guide to Presentation Success

Getting the perfect presentation design is just a step toward a successful presentation. For the experienced user, building presentation skills is the answer to elevating the power of your message and showing expertise on any subject. Still, one can ask: is it the same set of skills, or are they dependable on the type of presentation?

In this article, we will introduce the different types of presentations accompanied by the skillset required to master them. The purpose, as always, is to retain the audience’s interest for a long-lasting and convincing message.

Table of Contents

The Importance of Presentation Skills

Persuasive presentations, instructional presentations, informative presentations, inspirational presentations, basic presentation skills, what are the main difficulties when giving a presentation, recommendations to improve your presentation skills, closing statement.

Effective communication is the answer to reaching business and academic goals. The scenarios in which we can be required to deliver a presentation are as diverse as one can imagine. Still, some core concepts apply to all presentations.

 We define presentation skills as a compendium of soft skills that directly affect your presentation performance and contribute to creating a great presentation. These are not qualities acquired by birth but skills you ought to train and master to delve into professional environments.

You may ask: is it really that evident when a presenter is not prepared? Here are some common signs people can experience during presentations:

• Evasive body language: Not making eye contact with the audience, arms closed tightly to the body, hands in pockets all the time.
• Lack of interest in the presenter’s voice: dull tone, not putting an effort to articulate the topics.
• Doubting when asked to answer a question
• Irksome mood

The list can go on about common presenter mistakes , and most certainly, it will affect the performance of any presented data if the lack of interest by the presenter is blatantly obvious.  Another element to consider is anxiety, and according to research by the National Institute of Mental Health, 73% of the population in the USA is affected by glossophobia , which is the fear of public speaking, judgment, or negative evaluation by other people.

Therefore, presentation skills training is essential for any business professional who wants to achieve effective communication . It will remove the anxiety from presentation performance and help users effectively deliver their message and connect with the audience.

Archetypes of presentations

Persuasive presentations aim to convince the audience – often in short periods – to acquire a product or service, adhere to a cause, or invest in a company. For business entrepreneurs or politicians, persuasive presentations are their tool for the trade.

Unless you aim to be perceived as an imposter, a proper persuasive presentation has the elements of facts, empathy, and logic, balanced under a well-crafted narrative. The central pillar of these presentations is to identify the single factor that gathered your audience: it could be a market need, a social cause, or a revolutionary concept for today’s society. It has to be something with enough power to gather critiques – both good and bad.

That single factor has to be backed up by facts. Research that builds your hypothesis on how to solve that problem. A deep understanding of the target audience’s needs , concerns, and social position regarding the solution your means can offer. When those elements are in place, building a pitch becomes an easy task. 

Graphics can help you introduce information in a compelling format, lowering the need for lengthy presentations. Good presentation skills for persuasive presentations go by the hand of filtering relevant data and creating the visual cues that resonate with what your audience demands.

One powerful example of a persuasive presentation is the technique known as the elevator pitch . You must introduce your idea or product convincingly to the audience in a timeframe between 30 seconds and less than 2 minutes. You have to expose:

• What do you do 
• What’s the problem to solve
• Why is your solution different from others 
• Why should the audience care about your expertise

For that very purpose, using engaging graphics with contrasting colors elevates the potential power of your message. It speaks professionalism, care for details, and out-of-the-box thinking. Knowing how to end a presentation is also critical, as your CTAs should be placed with care.

Therefore, let’s resume the requirements of persuasive presentations in terms of good presentation skills:

• Identifying problems and needs
• Elaborating “the hook” (the element that grabs the audience’s attention)
• Knowing how to “tie” your audience (introducing a piece of information related to the hook that causes an emotional impact)
• Broad knowledge of body language and hand gestures to quickly convey your message
• Being prepared to argue a defense of your point of view
• Handling rejection
• Having a proactive attitude to convert opportunities into new projects
• Using humor, surprise, or personal anecdotes as elements to sympathize with the audience
• Having confidence
• Be able to summarize facts and information in visually appealing ways

You can learn more about persuasive presentation techniques by clicking here .

In the case of instructional presentations, we ought to differentiate two distinctive types:

• Lecture Presentations : Presentations being held at universities or any other educative institution. Those presentations cover, topic by topic, and the contents of a syllabus and are created by the team of teachers in charge of the course.
• Training Presentations : These presentations take place during in-company training sessions and usually comprise a good amount of content that is resumed into easy-to-take solutions. They are aimed to coach employees over certain topics relevant to their work performance. The 70-20-10 Model is frequently used to address these training situations.

Lecture presentations appeal to the gradual introduction of complex concepts, following a structure set in the course’s syllabus. These presentations often have a similar aesthetic as a group of professors or researchers created to share their knowledge about a topic. Personal experience does tell that course presentations often rely on factual data, adequately documented, and on the theoretical side.

An example of a presentation that lies under this concept is a Syllabus Presentation, used by the teaching team to introduce the subject to new students, evaluation methods, concepts to be learned, and expectations to pass the course.

On the other hand, training presentations are slide decks designed to meet an organization’s specific needs in the formal education of their personnel. Commonly known as “continuous education,” plenty of companies invest resources in coaching their employees to achieve higher performance results. These presentations have the trademark of being concise since their idea is to introduce the concepts that shall be applied in practice sessions. 

Ideally, the training presentations are introduced with little text and easy-to-recognize visual cues. Since the idea is to summarize as much as possible, these are visually appealing for the audience. They must be dynamic enough to allow the presenter to convey the message.

Those key takeaways remind employees when they revisit their learning resources and allow them to ruminate on questions that fellow workers raise. 

To sum up this point, building presentation skills for instructional presentations requires:

• Ability to put complex concepts into simpler words
• Patience and a constant learning mindset
• Voice training to deliver lengthy speeches without being too dense
• Ability to summarize points and note the key takeaways
• Empathizing with the audience to understand their challenges in the learning process

The informative presentations take place in business situations, such as when to present project reports from different departments to the management. Another potential usage of these presentations is in SCRUM or other Agile methodologies, when a sprint is completed, to discuss the advance of the project with the Product Owner.

As they are presentations heavily dependent on data insights, it’s common to see the usage of infographics and charts to express usually dense data in simpler terms and easy to remember. 

Informative presentations don’t just fall into the business category. Ph.D. Dissertation and Thesis presentations are topics that belong to the informative presentations category as they condense countless research hours into manageable reports for the academic jury. 

Since these informational presentations can be perceived as lengthy and data-filled, it is important to learn the following professional presentation skills:

• Attention to detail
• Be able to explain complex information in simpler terms
• Creative thinking
• Powerful diction
• Working on pauses and transitions
• Pacing the presentation, so not too much information is divulged per slide

The leading inspirational platform, TEDx, comes to mind when talking about inspirational presentations. This presentation format has the peculiarity of maximizing the engagement with the audience to divulge a message, and due to that, it has specific requirements any presenter must meet.

This presentation format usually involves a speaker on a stage, either sitting or better standing, in which the presenter engages with the audience with a storytelling format about a life experience, a job done that provided a remarkable improvement for society, etc.

Empathizing with the audience is the key ingredient for these inspirational presentations. Still, creativity is what shapes the outcome of your performance as people are constantly looking for different experiences – not the same recipe rephrased with personal touches. The human factor is what matters here, way above data and research. What has your experience to offer to others? How can it motivate another human being to pursue a similar path or discover their true calling?

To achieve success in terms of communication skills presentation, these inspirational presentations have the following requirements:

• Focus on the audience (engage, consider their interests, and make them a part of your story)
• Putting ego aside
• Creative communication skills
• Storytelling skills
• Body language knowledge to apply the correct gestures to accompany your story
• Voice training
• Using powerful words

After discussing the different kinds of presentations we can come across at any stage of our lives, a group of presentation skills is standard in any type of presentation. See below what makes a good presentation and which skills you must count on to succeed as a presenter.

Punctuality

Punctuality is a crucial aspect of giving an effective presentation. Nothing says more about respect for your audience and the organization you represent than delivering the presentation on time . Arriving last minute puts pressure on the tech team behind audiovisuals, as they don’t have enough preparation to test microphones, stage lights, and projector settings, which can lead to a less powerful presentation Even when discussing presentations hosted in small rooms for a reduced audience, testing the equipment becomes essential for an effective presentation.

A solution for this is to arrive at least 30 minutes early. Ideally, one hour is a sweet spot since the AV crew has time to check the gear and requirements for your presentation. Another benefit of this, for example, in inspirational presentations, is measuring the previous presenter’s impact on the audience. This gives insights about how to resonate with the public, and their interest, and how to accommodate your presentation for maximum impact.

Body Language

Our bodies can make emotions transparent for others, even when we are unaware of such a fact. Proper training for body language skills reduces performance anxiety, giving the audience a sense of expertise about the presented topic. 

Give your presentation and the audience the respect they deserve by watching over these potential mistakes:

• Turning your back to the audience for extended periods : It’s okay to do so when introducing an important piece of information or explaining a graph, but it is considered rude to give your back to the audience constantly.
• Fidgeting : We are all nervous in the presence of strangers, even more, if we are the center of attention for that moment. Instead of playing with your hair or making weird hand gestures, take a deep breath to center yourself before the presentation and remember that everything you could do to prepare is already done. Trust your instincts and give your best.
• Intense eye contact : Have you watched a video where the presenter stared at the camera the entire time? That’s the feeling you transmit to spectators through intense eye contact. It’s a practice often used by politicians to persuade.
• Swearing : This is a no-brainer. Even when you see influencers swearing on camera or in podcasts or live presentations, it is considered an informal and lousy practice for business and academic situations. If you have a habit to break when it comes to this point, find the humor in these situations and replace your swear words with funny alternatives (if the presentation allows for it). 

Voice Tone plays a crucial role in delivering effective presentations and knowing how to give a good presentation. Your voice is a powerful tool for exposing your ideas and feelings . Your voice can articulate the message you are telling, briefing the audience if you feel excited about what you are sharing or, in contrast, if you feel the presentation is a burden you ought to complete.

Remember, passion is a primary ingredient in convincing people. Therefore, transmitting such passion with a vibrant voice may help gather potential business partners’ interest.  

But what if you feel sick prior to the presentation? If, by chance, your throat is sore minutes before setting foot on the stage, try this: when introducing yourself, mention that you are feeling a bit under the weather. This resonates with the audience to pay more attention to your efforts. In case you don’t feel comfortable about that, ask the organizers for a cup of tea, as it will settle your throat and relax your nerves.

Tech Skills

Believe it or not, people still feel challenged by technology these days. Maybe that’s the reason why presentation giants like Tony Robbins opt not to use PowerPoint presentations . The reality is that there are plenty of elements involved in a presentation that can go wrong from the tech side:

• A PDF not opening
• Saving your presentation in a too-recent PowerPoint version
• A computer not booting up
• Mac laptops and their never-ending compatibility nightmare
• Not knowing how to change between slides
• Not knowing how to use a laser pointer
• Internet not working
• Audio not working

We can come up with a pretty long list of potential tech pitfalls, and yet more than half of them fall in presenters not being knowledgeable about technology.

If computers aren’t your thing, let the organization know about this beforehand. There is always a crew member available to help presenters switch between slides or configure the presentation for streaming. This takes the pressure off your shoulders, allowing you to concentrate on the content to present. Remember, even Bill Gates can get a BSOD during a presentation .

Presentations, while valuable for conveying information and ideas, can be daunting for many individuals. Here are some common difficulties people encounter when giving presentations:

Public Speaking Anxiety

Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, affects a significant portion of the population. This anxiety can lead to nervousness, trembling, and forgetfulness during a presentation.

Lack of Confidence

Many presenters struggle with self-doubt, fearing that they may not be knowledgeable or skilled enough to engage their audience effectively.

Content Organization

Organizing information in a coherent and engaging manner can be challenging. Presenters often grapple with how to structure their content to make it easily digestible for the audience. Artificial Intelligence can help us significantly reduce the content arrangement time when you work with tools like our AI Presentation Maker (made for presenters by experts in presentation design). 

Audience Engagement

Keeping the audience’s attention and interest throughout the presentation can be difficult. Distractions, disengaged attendees, or lack of interaction can pose challenges.

Technical Issues

Technology glitches, such as malfunctioning equipment, incompatible file formats, or poor internet connectivity, can disrupt presentations and increase stress.

Time Management

Striking the right balance between providing enough information and staying within time limits is a common challenge. Going over or under the allotted time can affect the effectiveness of the presentation.

Handling Questions and Challenges

Responding to unexpected questions, criticism, or challenges from the audience can be difficult, especially when presenters are unprepared or lack confidence in their subject matter.

Visual Aids and Technology

Creating and effectively using visual aids like slides or multimedia can be a struggle for some presenters. Technical competence is essential in this aspect.

Language and Articulation

Poor language skills or unclear articulation can hinder effective communication. Presenters may worry about stumbling over words or failing to convey their message clearly.

Maintaining appropriate and confident body language can be challenging. Avoiding nervous habits, maintaining eye contact, and using gestures effectively requires practice.

Overcoming Impersonal Delivery

In virtual presentations, maintaining a personal connection with the audience can be difficult. The absence of face-to-face interaction can make it challenging to engage and read the audience.

Cultural and Diversity Awareness

Presenting to diverse audiences requires sensitivity to cultural differences and varying levels of familiarity with the topic.

In this section, we gathered some tips on how to improve presentation skills that can certainly make an impact if applied to your presentation skills. We believe these skills can be cultivated to transform into habits for your work routine.

Tip #1: Build a narrative

One memorable way to guarantee presentation success is by writing a story of all the points you desire to cover. This statement is based on the logic behind storytelling and its power to connect with people .

Don’t waste time memorizing slides or reading your presentation to the audience. It feels unnatural, and any question that diverts from the topic in discussion certainly puts you in jeopardy or, worse, exposes you as a fraud in the eyes of the audience. And before you ask, it is really evident when a presenter has a memorized speech. 

Build and rehearse the presentation as if telling a story to a group of interested people. Lower the language barrier by avoiding complex terms that maybe even you aren’t fully aware of their meaning. Consider the ramifications of that story, what it could lead to, and which are the opportunities to explore. Then, visualize yourself giving the presentation in a natural way.

Applying this technique makes the presentation feel like second nature to you. It broadens the spectrum in which you can show expertise over a topic or even build the basis for new interesting points of view about the project.

Tip #2: Don’t talk for more than 3 minutes per slide

It is a common practice of presenters to bombard the audience with facts and information whilst retaining the same slide on the screen. Why can this happen? It could be because the presenter condensed the talk into very few slides and preferred to talk. The reality is that your spectators won’t retain the information you are giving unless you give visual cues to help that process. 

Opt to prepare more slides and pace your speech to match the topics shown on each slide. Don’t spend more than 3 minutes per slide unless you have to introduce a complex piece of data. Use visual cues to direct the spectators about what you talk about, and summarize the principal concepts discussed at the end of each section.

Tip #3: Practice meditation daily

Anxiety is the number one enemy of professional presenters. It slowly builds without you being aware of your doubts and can hinder your performance in multiple ways: making you feel paralyzed, fidgeting, making you forget language skills or concepts, affecting your health, etc.

Meditation is an ancient practice taken from Buddhist teachings that train your mind to be here in the present. We often see the concepts of meditation and mindfulness as synonyms, whereas you should be aware that meditation is a practice that sets the blocks to reach a state of mindfulness. For presenters, being in the here and now is essential to retain focus, but meditation techniques also teach us to control our breathing and be in touch with our body signals when stress builds up. 

The customary practice of meditation has an impact on imagination and creativity but also helps to build patience – a skill much needed for connecting with your audience in instructional presentations.

Having the proper set of presentation skills can be quite subjective. It goes beyond presentation tips and deepens into how flexible we can be in our ability to communicate ideas.

Different presentations and different audiences shape the outcome of our efforts. Therefore, having a basic understanding of how to connect, raise awareness, and empathize with people can be key ingredients for your career as a presenter. A word of advice: success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes dedication and patience to build communication skills . Don’t condition your work to believe you will be ready “someday”; it’s best to practice and experience failure as part of the learning process.

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• Presentation Hacks

10 Public Speaking Games and Activities to Try

• By: Kelly Allison

Public speaking is a skill like any other—to become great at it, you need to practice. But if you’re like most, then you probably don’t have a room full of people at the ready that you can speak in front of every day. Don’t let that stop you from practicing, though.

There are actually a ton of games and activities you can take advantage of that’ll help you hone your chops and become the best presenter you can be without the need for a formal audience.

Speak Nonsense According to research , an excellent presentation is 38% your voice, 55% non-verbal communication and just 7% your content. In other words, your delivery matters even more than what you say, and this exercise helps you refine it. Find a paragraph online in a language you don’t understand or simply write down a few lines of jibberish, and practice saying it aloud as though you’re giving a speech. Pay mind to your tone, inflections, and generally how you can use your voice to create more interest.

Learn From the Pros Look online for speeches that are widely accepted as exceptional. The most popular TED Talks of all time is a great place to start. Pick a talk that you’re interested in and watch it through a critical lens. Analyze the narrative structure the speaker uses, what makes their delivery effective, how their visuals enhance their talk and other components that make their speech extraordinary.

30 Seconds Filler-Free Filler words like “uh” “um” and “y’know” not only make your talk more difficult to listen to, but they also make you seem less prepared and authoritative. For this exercise, record yourself giving a talk on any topic for 30 seconds, taking care to omit all filler words. Whenever you use a filler word, start over and try again. Do this exercise ten times, filler-free.

One Minute Off-the-Cuff For this exercise, you’ll set a timer on your phone for one minute and record yourself giving an impromptu speech on any topic that interests you. The only rule is that you can’t prepare for it in any way. This is designed to get you more comfortable speaking off-the-cuff and minimize the anxiety that comes from being afraid you won’t have anything to say.

Tell a Photo Story Storytelling is critical to engaging your audience and helping them retain the information you’re sharing. To practice developing narratives, find an interesting photo online and record yourself presenting a story about it. Discuss what you think the backstory is, who the people are, their dreams, their motivations, and anything else that’ll tell a compelling story about them.

Make Up a Definition No matter what your presentation is about, you should always seem like you have authority over the topic. For this exercise, choose a word you don’t know the definition of and record yourself saying, with authority, what you think it means. Pay attention to how you can use your voice and intonations to have more command and seem more authoritative.

Q&A With an Expert You’ll need to find a friend for this one. Choose a topic or job that you don’t know much about. Ask your friend to interview you about it and answer their questions as though you’re a well-informed expert. This will help you with both your delivery and authority.

Gush About Something You Don’t Love Enthusiasm is contagious. If you want your audience to be excited about your topic, then you need to show enthusiasm for it. Choose something you’re indifferent about, say, a kitchen utensil, and practice speaking about it enthusiastically. Use your voice, emphasis, and body language to make it seem like the most exciting thing in the universe.

Make a Commercial Presentations are all about selling an idea, so you should practice the art of sales and persuasion to be the best you can be. Choose an item in your home and create a one-minute commercial about it. Record yourself saying what makes it special, how it can enhance lives, and why everyone needs that item in their corner.

Where Did That Name Come From? This is another exercise that’ll make you a better storyteller on stage. Pick an item in your home, like a stapler, and tell a story about how it got its name. The idea here isn’t to be accurate, so by all means, make something up; this is just to get you in the habit of finding and developing interesting stories from anything.

Looking for more ways to improve your presentation game? Then take Ethos3’s Badge Assessment to discover your unique presentation persona.

Kelly Allison

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Making a presentation: language and phrases (2)

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Here are some more phrases to help you make a great and professional presentation in English, from starting to concluding and summarising.

5. Starting the presentation

• To begin with … .
• To start with … .
• Let’s start/begin by looking at … .
• I’d like to start by looking at … .
• Let’s start with / start by looking at … .

6. Closing a section of the presentation

• So, that concludes [title of the section] … .
• So, that’s an overview of … .
• I think that just about covers … .

7. Beginning a new section of the presentation

• Now let’s move on to … .
• Now let’s take a look at … .
• Now I’d like to move on to … .
• Next I’d like to take a look at … .
• Moving on to the next part, I’d like to … .
• Moving on to the next section, let’s take a look at … .

8. Concluding and summarising the presentation

• Well, that brings us to the end of the final section. Now, I’d like to summarise by … .
• That brings us to the end of the final section. Now, if I can just summarise the main points again.
• That concludes my presentation. Now, if I can just summarise the main points.
• That’s an overview of … . Now, just to summarise, let’s quickly look at the main points again.

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How-To Geek

How to practice your presentations with powerpoint's presenter coach.

Rehearsing presentations gets easier with PowerPoint.

Quick Links

How the presenter coach helps you with your presentations, what you'll need, how to launch the presenter coach in powerpoint, reading your rehearsal report.

Microsoft PowerPoint now has a Presenter Coach to let you rehearse your presentations before going to the audience. This coach gives you a detailed report telling you how well you did and suggesting areas for improvement. Here's how to use it.

Consider the Presenter Coach in PowerPoint as a trusted friend who listens to you practice performing  your presentations . This coach reviews your entire presentation and creates a report detailing your performance.

For example, it will grade you on how fast you speak and how much you use filler words like "um" and "ah." It will also inform you of words you might want to avoid and encourage you not to simply read the words on your slides aloud.

Basically, if you need a second opinion on your presenting style, this is a great way to get it.

Related: 8 Tips to Make the Best PowerPoint Presentations

To use the Presenter Coach in PowerPoint, you must have:

• a Microsoft account or a Microsoft 365 work or school account
• a working internet connection
• a microphone (so that PowerPoint can listen to what you're saying)

Also, the Presenter Coach only works if you use the English language in PowerPoint. Other languages are not yet supported as of April 2021.

PowerPoint's Presenter Coach works for any presentation. You can use it with your commercial, educational, and even family presentations.

To start using this feature, open your presentation with PowerPoint.

In the PowerPoint window, click the "Slide Show" tab on the ribbon at the top of the window.

If you don't see the Slide Show tab, you're probably in Slide Master View. Close this view by selecting "Slide Master" at the top and then clicking "Close Master View."

In the Slide Show tab, click "Rehearse with Coach" to open PowerPoint's Presenter Coach.

Your presentation will open in fullscreen mode. To activate the Presenter Coach, click "Start Rehearsing" in the bottom-right corner of your window. Optionally, enable "Show real-time feedback" if you want the coach to give you tips while you're still presenting.

Now, begin your presentation like you normally would. If you enabled the real-time feedback option, you'll see some tips appear in the bottom-right corner of your window.

Press "Esc" when you're done presenting to exit fullscreen mode. PowerPoint will now open your rehearsal report.

It's important to read and analyze the Presenter Coach's report properly. This will help you find areas for improvement and see whether you're doing well.

The report will vanish as soon as you close the report window. To save the report, take a screenshot of it.

Here's what each section in the report tells you about your presentation:

• Summary : Summary tells you the amount of time you spent practicing your presentation. It also shows the number of slides you rehearsed.
• Fillers : In the Fillers section, you'll see the filler words (umm, ah) that you used during your presentation. Using these filler words makes you sound less confident, and you should try to avoid using them.
• Sensitive Phrases : Sensitive Phrases highlights culturally sensitive phrases that you used in your presentation, which you might want to avoid. It considers the following areas sensitive: disability, age, gender, race, sexual orientation, mental health, geopolitical topics, and profanity.
• Pace : The Pace section tells you the pace of your presentation. If you were too fast or too slow, you'll find that information here.
• Originality : Microsoft suggests that you avoid reading out the text written in your presentation slides, as this makes your presentation boring. Instead, you should use original content in your speech. The Originality section informs you if you only read the text from your slides.

Now that you know where you need to improve, click the "Rehearse Again" button at the top of the report to re-present your presentation. When you're done, PowerPoint will make another report detailing your new presentation performance.

Related: How to Add Music to Your PowerPoint Presentation

How to Present over Video

19 online lessons

Practice exercises

CPD Accredited

Digital certificate

• 2 hours of learning

Course Outcomes

• Know how to design and deliver successful and memorable video presentations
• Increase your confidence communicating online and feel more comfortable speaking in front of a virtual audience - whether it's 2 people, 20, or 200
• Use body language, eye contact, and hand gestures to enhance your message
• Connect, engage, and persuade your audience remotely with effective storytelling
• Optimize your delivery with the right tech setup
• Easily identify areas for improvement via mock video-conferencing exercises with instant feedback

Practice what you learn

In this course, you'll learn the fundamentals of presenting virtually and then practice what you learn in a realistic online video conferencing exercise.

Through online classes, you'll learn how to create and design an engaging presentation, set up the tech to look your best, use hand gestures and storytelling to enhance your message, and more.

After learning the theory, you'll have the unique opportunity to practice, improve and build your confidence in the virtual presentation exercise.

Presentations over video require a unique skill set for delivery compared to in-person presentations and meetings. For example, you have to adapt to a lack of audience feedback and body language cues that you'd otherwise have from a real-life audience.

Deliver effective virtual presentations

Practice with exercises

Improve with feedback

Course content.

Example videos

Throughout this course, you'll watch real-life video examples of the skills being taught, including how to start a presentation, use your voice effectively, and answer audience questions.

Learn from these videos and transfer the skills to your own public speaking.

Practice Exercises

How do the exercises work.

Practice your virtual presenting skills on a webpage that looks and feels like a video conferencing platform - no additional download required.  Upload your own slides  into the exercise for the most realistic practice.

While delivering your speech, your voice and delivery will be analyzed, providing  instant feedback  when you've finished on aspects such as hesitation words, audience perception and confidence.

You can also  practice thinking on your feet and answering questions  from the virtual audience throughout your presentation or when you've finished speaking. You can even load in your own custom questions for a more targeted Q&A session.

Practice video presentations in the VirtualSpeech practice exercise. Answer audience questions, receive instant feedback on your performance, and watch yourself present on a video recording to identify areas for improvement.

Enable distractions  while you present to really test your skills, such as mobile phones ringing and loud background noise.

Review the recorded audio and video to identify areas for improvement and  track your progress  with automated feedback, prompts, quizzes, and self-evaluation.

Impromptu practice

When you enroll on this course, you'll also receive access to an impromptu exercise. Test your impromptu abilities by speaking to random images for 30 seconds each. You'll then receive feedback on your performance.

This exercise is at the start of the course and gives you a chance to warm up for the course.

Features in the practice exercises

Answer questions, speech analysis, record the presentation, what's included in this course:.

• 4 case studies
• 2 practice exercises
• All exercise features
• Quizzes and assessment
• Earn a digital course certificate
• Flexible, self-led format
• Access to updated content

CEU - Continuing Education Units

2Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

CPD Credits / Hours: 2

Certificate No:  A031339

This course

12 months access to this course

Pay in Euros

Access all courses

(per month), frequently asked questions.

You can access the classes through the VirtualSpeech website, on any standard web browser such as Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

The practice exercises can be completed online or in virtual reality (if you have a VR headset).

When you enroll in the course, you'll get 24/7 access to the course (including tutorial videos, case studies, practice exercises, VR, and more) through the VirtualSpeech website and in VR.

Both the online classes and exercises run in your browser, no additional software or download is required.

If you have a VR headset, you can also access the practice exercises in VR. Here's a list of our recommended VR headsets .

The online exercises have been tested across multiple browsers and run smoothly on Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Edge.

We accept payment via Credit Card, Debit Card or PayPal directly through the VirtualSpeech site. If you'd like to pay with an Invoice or using another payment method, please contact us.

Yes you can. After pressing the 'Buy Now' button on this page, select the number of users (maximum is 25).

After the payment, you'll be made course admin and can add users to the course from the admin dashboard.

Yes, when you've completed this course, we'll send you a Certificate of Achievement, which you can share in the Certifications section of your LinkedIn profile, on printed resumes, CVs, or other documents.

If the course does not meet your expectations, you can get a full refund within 7 days of purchasing the course.

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Guidance on building better digital services in government

Jargon Madness: A Plain Language Exercise

Federal plain writing practitioners may find it hard to engage with their colleagues, and formal plain language training programs can sometimes be a difficult sell to leadership.

One agency developed an entertaining exercise to promote plain language practices by focusing on a common enemy of the plain writer: jargon .

Laura Rabuck, a research health science specialist and lead content strategist at the Veterans Health Administration, created a “Jargon Madness” tournament-style bracket. It’s modeled after a similar annual college basketball-themed bracket. In this version, jargon battles for the title of “Most confusing” based on votes.

View the Jargon Madness slides (PowerPoint presentation, 1.54 MB, 34 pages)

from Laura Rabuck’s 2022 Federal Plain Language Summit presentation. You can also watch the 28-minute, 13-second video on YouTube .

Jargon Madness is a plain language conversation starter that cuts across the organizational chart. It offers engagement and education. Unlike a meeting or a scheduled training, it’s a fun, asynchronous activity that staff can participate in when they have time.

If you want to host a Jargon Madness event at your agency, consider the following: 

• Confirm leadership buy-in and if there’s an audience .
• Confirm your champions/sponsors and partners .
• Confirm staffing support .
• Confirm language with your general counsel.
• Decide bracket size and corresponding timeline .
• Decide (and test) where you’ll host it and how voting will work.
• Decide how to identify jargon .
• Develop a marketing plan , however small (but mighty!).
• Research and draft ideas for education .
• Decide on post-event survey .

Start now! Next March will arrive quickly.

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Four Takeaways on the Race to Amass Data for A.I.

To make artificial intelligence systems more powerful, tech companies need online data to feed the technology. Here’s what to know.

• Share full article

By Cecilia Kang ,  Cade Metz and Stuart A. Thompson

Cecilia Kang reports on tech policy, Cade Metz covers artificial intelligence and Stuart Thompson writes about disinformation.

Online data has long been a valuable commodity. For years, Meta and Google have used data to target their online advertising. Netflix and Spotify have used it to recommend more movies and music. Political candidates have turned to data to learn which groups of voters to train their sights on.

Over the last 18 months, it has become increasingly clear that digital data is also crucial in the development of artificial intelligence. Here’s what to know.

The more data, the better.

The success of A.I. depends on data. That’s because A.I. models become more accurate and more humanlike with more data.

In the same way that a student learns by reading more books, essays and other information, large language models — the systems that are the basis of chatbots — also become more accurate and more powerful if they are fed more data.

Some large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 , released in 2020, were trained on hundreds of billions of “tokens,” which are essentially words or pieces of words. More recent large language models were trained on more than three trillion tokens.

The Data Inside GPT-3

OpenAI’s groundbreaking A.I. model was trained on billions of websites, books and Wikipedia articles collected from across the internet. OpenAI did not share the data it used to train its recent models.

Common Crawl

Text from web pages collected since 2007.

(3 billion tokens)

English-language

Wikipedia pages.

Books 1 and Books 2

OpenAI has not explained the contents of these datasets. They are believed to contain text from millions of published books.

410 billion tokens

Web pages linked from Reddit that received three or more upvotes – an indication of approval from users.

Common Crawl: Text from web pages collected since 2007.

Books 1 and Books 2: OpenAI has not explained the contents of these datasets. They are believed to contain text from millions of published books.

Wikipedia: English-language Wikipedia pages.

Online data is a precious and finite resource.

Tech companies are using up publicly available online data to develop their A.I. models, faster than new data is being produced. According to one prediction, high-quality digital data will be exhausted by 2026.

Tech companies are going to great lengths to obtain more data.

In the race for more data, OpenAI, Google and Meta are turning to new tools, changing their terms of service and engaging in internal debates.

At OpenAI, researchers created a program in 2021 that converted the audio of YouTube videos into text and then fed the transcripts into one of its A.I. models, going against YouTube’s terms of service, people with knowledge of the matter said.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for using copyrighted news articles without permission for A.I. development. OpenAI and Microsoft have said they used news articles in transformative ways that did not violate copyright law.)

Google, which owns YouTube, also used YouTube data to develop its A.I. models, wading into a legal gray area of copyright, people with knowledge of the action said. And Google revised its privacy policy last year so it could use publicly available material to develop more of its A.I. products.

At Meta, executives and lawyers last year debated how to get more data for A.I. development and discussed buying a major publisher like Simon & Schuster. In private meetings, they weighed the possibility of putting copyrighted works into their A.I. model, even if it meant they would be sued later, according to recordings of the meetings, which were obtained by The Times.

One solution may be ‘synthetic’ data.

OpenAI, Google and other companies are exploring using their A.I. to create more data. The result would be what is known as “synthetic” data. The idea is that A.I. models generate new text that can then be used to build better A.I.

Synthetic data is risky because A.I. models can make errors. Relying on such data can compound those mistakes.

Cecilia Kang reports on technology and regulatory policy and is based in Washington D.C. She has written about technology for over two decades. More about Cecilia Kang

Cade Metz writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology. More about Cade Metz

Stuart A. Thompson writes about how false and misleading information spreads online and how it affects people around the world. He focuses on misinformation, disinformation and other misleading content. More about Stuart A. Thompson

Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence

News  and Analysis

Artificial intelligence is peering into restaurant garbage pails  and crunching grocery-store data to try to figure out how to send less uneaten food into dumpsters.

David Autor, an M.I.T. economist and tech skeptic, argues that A.I. is fundamentally different  from past waves of computerization.

Economists doubt that artificial intelligence is already visible in productivity data . Big companies, however, talk often about adopting it to improve efficiency.

OpenAI unveiled Voice Engine , an A.I. technology that can recreate a person’s voice from a 15-second recording.

Amazon said it had added $2.75 billion to its investment in Anthropic , an A.I. start-up that competes with companies like OpenAI and Google.

Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a bill  to prevent the use of A.I. to copy a performer’s voice. It is the first such measure in the United States.