Select Better Words for Your Presentation

Use Shorter Words and Phrases
The most powerful words in our language tend to be short. For example: love, war, sex, food, hate, fun, money, power. If a sentence is so lengthy that you have to stop to take a breath, it will be too long to be understood. Break long sentences and phrases into shorter ones. What words can you eliminate to clean up your speech? Do they cloud or clarify the message you are trying to convey? Work on this in your daily business correspondence and it will automatically rub off in your speech.

Action Verbs
In most cases verbs are better than nouns and action verbs are far better than passive verbs. Good action verbs are: build, climb, call, start, fight, promote and sell. Use these verbs when you tell your audience what to do. Be sure to use action verbs in your call to action. Use less passive verbs like “is” and “have”. If you delivered a speech using only one word – that word would be an action verb.

“You” versus “I”

Remember your audience wants to hear about them – not about you. That means that the word they want to here more than any other is “you”. For that reason remove your use of “I” and “me”. You and yours is better than we and ours which in turn is better than I, me and mine. Run your speech through the “you-I” test. There should be more use of “you” than of “I” in your speech.


Presentation Tips on Twitter Presentation Skills Club on Facebook Executive Speech Coach, Business presentation tips from George Torok, the Speech Coach for Executives