1. Introduction
In the world of technical engineering, when down to the wire, the act of giving a presentation, a so-called “soft skill,” is often considered shuntable. Each aspect of it is placed into the do-at-the-last-minute bucket. Practicing may be a single slide click-through with a timer, if at all. The reasons for this are more extensive than we can get into here, but I would like to pose a reason I do not often hear: nobody was ever taught how to present. Sure, we often have feedback sessions and pointers, but do those actually teach, or do they just prescribe solutions? By examining how different parts of giving a presentation work – voice and body – we can demystify it. Speaking is not just for people with “natural charisma.” It is a skill anyone can learn.
2. Criteria for Success
A successful presentation will effectively communicate your ideas. This requires:
- Maintaining your audience’s attention
- Facilitating audience comprehension
- Avoiding distractions for your audience
- Convincing your audience that you are a trustworthy expert
3. Purpose
I often find that presentation feedback is given in a very solution-oriented way. For instance, people are told to “talk louder,” but aren’t told how to talk louder. A lot of this advice, intentional or not, is often biased for native English speaking, neurotypical, and “professional” speakers. This unclear advice makes practicing difficult and boring. What do you even do, other than say the presentation over and over?
Besides, shaving identities for audience comfort may be a solution in the short term, but will hamper presentation quality in the long term. Without your own voice, you’ll always be copying others, making nothing that will stand out. You’ll be trapped “trying too hard.”
In this CommKit, we will look at tackling giving a presentation the same way we would tackle a technical problem. We learn what the problem is. We learn the techniques we can use to solve it. And we find a solution that is unique to each person’s own background and skill sets.
I will caution you: this is only possible with practice. You will need to embarrass yourself on the road to being better at presenting. Let go of your shame and let yourself try. You’ll thank yourself later.
4. Analyze Your Audience and Context
As with any technical communication, your primary goal is to share information with someone, so with whom, where, and how that is shared will all shape the way that you convey that information.
You’re probably used to editing content for the audience, but thinking about editing how you speak and move for the audience is important as well.
Consider the following:
- Occasion: Why are you giving this presentation?
- Conference, class presentation, funding pitch…
- Length of presentation: How long is this presentation?
- 30 minutes, an hour, more…
- Location of presentation: Where are you giving this presentation?
- A big stage, a small conference room, on Zoom or Teams…
- Attendees: Who is going to be at your presentation?
- Experts, engineers in similar fields, the general public, children…
- Tools for the presentation: What do you have to give your presentation?
- A PowerPoint, a poster, a laser pointer, a microphone…
Keep these in mind as you’re practicing your presentation, as there are ways that these can be important to the choices you’re making with your voice and body.
5. Best Practices
5.1. How the Voice Works
Your voice is something you use without thinking (ideally) every single day. Before we can talk about things to do with it, we need to understand how to use it.
If you have sung before, you have probably heard of head voice and chest voice. These are two different ways you can make your voice sound depending on how you use your vocal chords. Head voice is higher and “sweeter.” It can be accessed by using less air at a fast speed. Chest voice is lower and “powerful.” It can be accessed by using more air at a slower speed. Practice accessing your full range. You should feel like your voice is coming from that part of your body. If you struggle with volume, you may find it easier to be louder with a different voice.
Being more aware of how your voice works is the foundation that we will build on to do different things with it. Start your practice by trying to say a sentence all the way at the bottom of your voice. Say it again, higher. Keep stepping upwards until you get to the top.
5.2. Concentration and Relaxation
While there are many obvious benefits to concentrating and relaxing while giving a talk, the physical effects of stress on our bodies can have hugely negative impacts on the way our voices sound and the way our bodies move. Stress physically causes your muscles to contract, including the muscles in your throat. This will make you sound hoarse, strained, and may cause pitch breaks or make you lose your vocal range.
The first step to combatting this is noticing it is happening. I cannot count how many times I have thought I was not nervous when I definitely was. No matter how “ready” you feel about a presentation, take a few moments before starting to force yourself to calm down with one or more of these techniques.
Body Relaxation
Stretch. Walk around a little. Shake your body. Take a breath in for four seconds, hold it for four seconds, and release it for four seconds. Notice where tension is being kept in your body (usually your back or chest) and move that around. This will help to let yourself move more freely.
Mind Relaxation
Focus on what you can see in the room. Concentrate on little details. Picture yourself somewhere else that makes you happy. This will help to keep your mind from running over what may go wrong over and over. You can choose a mantra to calm yourself down, such as “trust yourself,” “keep going,” “you can do this.” It is often helpful to imagine someone telling this mantra to you.
Voice Relaxation
Run through all of your vocal pitches. Take a long breath in, and then exhale loudly – I like making a “HA” sound – for as long as you have breath to force some of that tension out of your chest and throat.
When actually giving the presentation, you should also check in with yourself. After every section, reassess your body. Have you built up stress? Depending on your context, your options for relaxing may change.
Body Relaxation
Roll your shoulders. Stretch your arms downward, so as not to pull too much attention to them. Open your mouth wide and shift your jaw around a little. Breath for slightly longer than normal to stretch out your chest. If you are giving a presentation online, you can stretch out your legs underneath your desk.
Mind Relaxation
If possible, taking a sip of water is a great way to give yourself a moment to pause and relax your mind. Imagine giving this talk in a venue you like to a person you love. For online presentations, put something on your desk you can look at. For in person ones, find a friend, or choose an audience member to be your pretend friend. Repeat your mantra.
Voice Relaxation
Purposefully clear your throat, focusing on the feeling of air in it. Sipping water is helpful here too, literally to make your throat feel better.
5.3. Projection and Breath Support
Projection and breath support are key to speaking loudly and clearly without yelling or straining yourself, and are possibly the most important skills to practice if you want to get better at speaking.
Posture
Stand up straighter. Your breath is being pushed out by your muscles in your chest. If you are hunched over, these muscles cannot do their job. Keep your chin up and your chest out. Imagine that there is a string attached to the top of your head, and pull that string upwards. You will probably think you are doing it, but you are not! This is especially important when you are giving a virtual presentation. You can place a stuffed animal or a pillow on your lap that forces you to sit up to keep it balanced.
Breathing Techniques
Next, pay attention to how you breathe. If you breathe in and your shoulders move upward, you are not getting as much air as you can. If breathing in through your nose creates a sound, you are probably breathing too quickly and shallowly. To practice proper technique, you want to push air out with your belly. Put your hands on your stomach. Take a long breath in through your nose and a long breath out through your mouth, focusing your air down there. You want to get as much air through your system as possible. There is a fundamental exercise called Farinelli Breathing. Breathe in for four seconds through your nose, hold it for four seconds, and then exhale out your mouth for four seconds. and then make a hissing noise out of your mouth for four. Do it again, but hold and exhale for six seconds. Then for eight seconds. Then for ten seconds. Can you do it? If not, you need to practice with your breath support more. The video at this link is a simple guided version of this exercise.
Now that your air is moving the right way, try talking. Really push your words out with that breath support. Keep your mouth open as you do this: no clenched jaws. You should hopefully be hearing some volume difference. If not, try different parts of your voice by pushing air out in a lower register or a higher one.
Other Tips
If all of this is still not working, you can cheat a little. When people say “talk louder,” they often actually mean “I can’t understand you.” If you make your consonants sharper than usual, this can help solve the problem. Hit hard consonants at the end of a word with more emphasis than usual. (I made this code to simulate this phenomenon.) This is especially useful if there is a lot of background noise, or if you’re presenting online and the connection may make it difficult to hear you.
Your venue defines your needs for projection and volume. Large rooms you need to fill with your voice, taking into account how sound will bounce off the ceiling and walls. Smaller rooms are easier to fill with sound because of this. If possible, it is useful to scout out the location and practice to see how much you need to project your voice. If not, try to adjust on the fly while presenting.
When it comes to online presentations or presentations where you have a microphone, you still should not slack on your projection and vocal support! While the volume control is less necessary, the clarity that comes with a well supported voice is even more important. Microphones can make your voice more distorted, depending on their quality.
5.4. Vocal Tempo, Rhythm, and Pitch
Now we are getting into some advanced techniques. These are tools you can use to really start to enhance your presentations from a baseline “you said the thing” to “you said the thing well and enthralled your audience.” The general theme of this section is creating variation in the things you say to increase interest and attention. By not saying every sentence the same way, you keep your audience interested in what you are doing.
Tempo
Talking too quickly muddies your messages more than anything else. You may do this for a number of reasons: you’re nervous, you want to get the presentation over with, you’re worried you don’t have time, you don’t want to forget what you’re going to say, or you already know something so your brain skips over it. It takes conscious and persistent effort to keep your tempo at a good pace.
Physically, you can force separations in your speech. Think about and actively breathe in between every sentence. Alternatively, think specifically about the consonants at the end of a sentence. These strategies both not only force you to pause, but force you to think about what you are doing. Active thinking of speed is crucial.
Unfortunately, I will say what you are afraid of: the best way to slow down is to practice. Knowing exactly what you want to say and how long it will take you to say those things is a huge boon in pacing yourself. As you get the pace of your presentation down, write down checkpoints of how long it takes to get to different parts of the presentation. During the presentation, reference these. If you are usually at slide 10 around minute 10 and you get there at minute 8, you know to adjust and slow down.
But what if you look down and see minute 15? What if it is not even your fault – what if the microphone took a while to work, or someone in the audience looked at you strangely and you had to reexplain something? Once again, this comes down to practice. Never go into a presentation without a plan of which points and/or slides are most important to your point and which you can skip for time. A smooth and casual, “This slide is here for your reference and I’m happy to provide it to you after the presentation. If you want to know more about this topic, feel free to ask me after.” will cover the panic and let you move on. Do your best not to put all these optional slides at the end, as this will actively make it look like you ran out of time and mess with the pacing of your presentation.
Rhythm
Rhythm is the pattern that you speak at. You can break this into both the types of words you are choosing and the cadence that you deliver them within a single sentence.
Consonance is the recurrence of similar sounds in a sentence. Repetition, especially repetition of consonant sounds, is very pleasing on the ear and can help make snappy, memorable sentences. For especially important statements, such as those at the beginning or end of a presentation, think about scripting a sentence that sounds snappy. Like that one! (look at the use of the letter “s”)
For word cadence, you utilize speed adjustments and pauses between words to create emphasis. Speeding up should not necessarily be done without a lot of practice, for reasons stated before, but slowing down can be very effective for anyone. Try pausing before saying an important point, or putting pauses between words in a crucial sentence. Only do this in a couple sections, or it might make your presentation feel choppy.
Pitch
Intonation, or pitch variety, can also help convey meaning and emphasis. If you speak with all your words at the same pitch, it can slide over someone’s ears and cause them to zone out. Pitch variation is more interesting to listen to. Listen to videos of people talking and pay special attention to how their pitch changes as they discuss things. Higher pitches are often used at moments of high energy and focus. Lower pitches convey more seriousness and confidence (think about news broadcasters). You probably do this in your day to day life without even thinking about it.
This is the section that has the most “rules are made to be broken” in them. A lot of public speakers have developed their own distinct style that break one or many of these rules. This is why it is most important to understand why people use these different things. If you struggle changing the pitch of your voice, do not strain yourself: create emphasis another way.
Sometimes, your audience can also affect what tempo/rhythm/pitch you use. You probably talk to children quite differently than you talk to fellow researchers. Children want more pointed moments of excitement and importance because they are learning what is exciting and important. Your presentation might end up in a higher pitch and a slower cadence when compared to one for professionals.
When giving a presentation online, using these tricks to retain attention are really crucial. There are so many more distractions when you are watching a virtual presentation, and it is so much harder to notice when people are losing attention. Try dialing up these techniques more than you normally would to really pull people in.
5.5. Note on Filler Words
An excess of filler words like “like” or “uh” or “so” are the easiest thing to comment on someone’s presentation when you are told to give feedback and do not know better. It is also one of the least useful comments you can get. Filler words are a perfectly natural part of speech. We use them as a way of signalling that we need time to think. The desire for sound often comes from a fear of being spoken over: if you are still making noise, you are indicating that you are not finished yet. You may also use them to indicate nuance or soften a statement you are saying and may protect you from the pedants in your audience.
It is, however, also true that a high amount of filler can detract from meaning. It also tends to be the case that the more “important” a talk is or the more formal a venue, the more people will latch onto filler words as a negative. If you really want to decrease your amount of filler, start by paying attention to which filler words you tend to use the most. Practice actively choosing silence when you are thinking. Replace the instinct to say something with another action – a breath, a clenched fist – and pause instead. While practicing this, it can be useful to literally say “PAUSE” after you say a filler word to associate them together.
5.6. Gesturing and Body Language
As mentioned before, how you hold your body can change how your voice sounds. It can also help convey mood and confidence to your audience. Facing your audience is the most important part of this. Try putting your body forward, and only allow yourself to turn above the hips. This helps to remind you not to ever face away from your audience for too long.
If you want to gesture for emphasis or to explain something, feel free to do so! A little punctuation of motion at the end of a statement can help sell how important it is. However, make sure if you do it, you do it. A large room can easily eat visibility on a motion. Make them open and do not keep yourself too tight around your body. Use the space you have. Remember to also modify the size of these when presenting online: you only have a little window that people can see you, so put your gestures in there.
When you are not actively gesturing, it can feel awkward to think of where to put your hands, since you never tend to think of that normally. Keep hands at your sides or relaxed in front of your midsection. It only feels weird and awkward because you’re thinking about it too hard.
If you are a fidgety person, you want to pay attention to your habits. Like filler words, too much emphasis is put on not fidgeting at all, but it can be distracting or deemed “unprofessional” in excess. Pick something simple that you can actively decide to fidget with so you do not subconsciously do something more distracting. Some good options include clicking unimportant buttons on a powerpoint clicker or flicking your fingers behind your back.
6. Annotated Examples
Annotated Conference Room Presentation
Conference Room Presentation Transcript with on-screen annotations
Annotated Zoom Presentation
Zoom Presentation Transcript with on-screen annotations
7. Additional Resources
If you want to learn more about any of these topics, here are some resources:
- Take 21T.102: Voice and Speech for the Actor
- Anatomy of the Voice (article)
- What Is Chest Voice, Mixed Voice, Head Voice And Falsetto? (video)
- The Muscles of Breath Support in Singing: Anatomy & Function of Breath Support in the Body (part 1) (part 2)
- How to Speak Louder Without Yelling (video)
- Watch this if you speak too quietly (video)
- Introvert’s HACKS to Speak LOUDER Without YELLING (video)
- Modified Farinelli Breathing (video)
- Four Tips To Do Voice Modulation While Speaking | Public Speaking Tips (video)
- How to Get Rid of Filler Words (video)
- How to stop saying “Like” every third word (or ‘uh’..or ‘ah’…or ‘um’…or ‘y’know’…) (video)
- What do I do with hands? Effective presentation gestures (video)
- Hands 1 (Blog) 1
- Hands 2 (Blog)
- Posture (Blog)