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Health & Fitness

Stand Up and Toast! Watch your Tone

When we speak with friends and colleagues, we have a natural cadence to our voices. Unfortunately, we often become monotone in formal presentations.

When you are giving a presentation, your voice is the most obvious tool you have to communicate with your listeners. How can you most effectively use your voice?

Volume

Of course, you need to be heard. If you don’t have access to a microphone, you need to project your voice to the back of the room, otherwise you will lose your audience. But if the room is small, don’t shout, you will come across as angry, not confident.

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At the same time, your listeners will tune you out if you use the same volume for your entire presentation. A better technique is to vary the volume of your speaking voice for emphasis. While the most obvious way to do this is to speak louder for the important points, sometimes a more surprising way to emphasize a point - especially one that is meant to evoke emotion - is to speak softly. 

Finally, think about which word you want to emphasize in your key sentences. To illustrate the point, use a simple sentence such as “Mary had a little lamb” and put the emphasis on a different word each time you say the sentence; you will see that the meaning can change with that emphasis. For example, if you emphasize “had” you can convey that she no longer has the lamb.

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Pitch

When it comes to public speaking, make sure that you vary your pitch, just as you would do in conversation. You can transform a sentence from a statement to a question by simply raising the pitch at the end of that sentence, so make sure that you don’t raise your voice when stating facts, since you will seem uncertain. A lower pitch typically conveys calmness and confidence.

Pace

Many speakers, when they become nervous, speak faster. To counter this tendency, don’t think of just “trying to get through” the speech. Think about which points you want to emphasize, so you can take a natural pause to allow your audience to absorb what you just told them, for example  just before and after making a key point.

Some presenters speak so quickly in conversation that their words run together, which is often just a habit. Make sure that you are clearly enunciating - this is especially true when speaking using technology, for example on conference calls or webinars. Consciously slowing down is also important when speaking in other countries, where your language may be the second (or third!) language for your listeners.

Knowing your audience will also help you determine your pace. During a recent conference, several presenters discussed that speaking too slowly for an audience that is “in the know” in a business context will bore them. They don’t need a pause to absorb the definition of a cost center budget, for example; in other words, in certain business situations, an overly lengthy pause is not effective.

You should strive to vary your speaking voice, yet still need to sound natural and be yourself. While many of us can surely pause more in our presentations, suddenly using extremely long pauses when your speaking style is more conversational will come across as being inauthentic. 

Find out more about clubs in District 4 Toastmasters: http://www.d4tm.org   

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