The Importance of Stress
Quite often when you are presenting in English as a second language, you focus so much on being ‘correct’ that you forget about being ‘human’. I have sat though many presentations where the presenter was using good words, good sentences and being more grammatical correct than I am, yet their presentation failed in its objective.
You see, in English choosing the correct words, the perfect grammar and the best sentence structure is not going to win you any speaking awards. In English, you need to use tone, stress and the art of silence.
What do I mean? Well, try getting a friend of yours to read a paragraph from any English article, magazine or book. Ask then not to use any tone, and just read what they see. What you will notice is that although what you are hearing is perfect English, with the correct grammar and sentence stress, it will sound terrible. The reason for this is that English needs intonation and rhythm. Without intonation and rhythm English dies. And that is one of the biggest mistakes I see when I view a presentation done in English by a speaker who is not a native English speaker.
So, how do you improve this?
Well the simple thing to do is to use the punctuation. When I was very little, my teacher always taught us to use the punctuation to take a breath and to look at your audience (if you are reading – which of course you should not be doing when presenting) And we can take this advice and use it in our presentations. When we come up to a comma (,) we should take a breath, and when we reach a full stop / period (.) we should use this for a one second pause.
No try reading the paragraph you heard before and try taking a breath when you come to a comma and pausing for one second when you come to a full stop. Does it sound a little better now?
Another good way to improve the sound of your English is to put a pause before and after an important word or phrase. What I mean here is best demonstrated by Margaret Thatcher when giving a speech. The words that she wanted to stress she paused, slowed down and looked directly at her audience. You can view a great example here
What you will notice that Margaret Thatcher doesn’t feel like she’s rushing, she is flowing smoothly and using natural pause and stress to make her speech come alive. She also allows her audience to stop laughing before continuing.
Margaret Thatcher was not a natural speaker, but she used some simple techniques to improve her speaking which made many of her speeches very powerful indeed.
So next time you do a presentation in English, think about your pauses, your breathing and how you can use these to improve the impact of your presentation.