Giving a Presentation Vocabulary

When giving a presentation vocabulary is required that will make your presentation sound professional and well thought through. You will also feel and sound more confident if you carefully structure your talk, using the correct phrases to begin, link your points, and finish off your talk.

You will find a free downloadable printout with a compilation of these phrases at the bottom of this page.

Presentation Outline

It is very important to carefully structure your presentation so that the audience can easily follow and understand you. I suggest the following guidelines:

Introduction – introduce what you will be presenting, let the audience know there will be time for questions at the end
Overview – give a general outline of your presentation
State Points – give your points in logical sequence, giving explanations and exceptions. Make a clear transition between each point.
State results and conclusions
Summarize
Close – relate the beginning of the presentation to the end
Questions – ask the audience if they have any questions

Commonly used phrases

Introduce the topic

Today, I will be talking about ……
As you all know ……..
I’m going to take a look at/examine ……..
Today, I will be concentrating on ……

Overview

The issues I want to mention/discuss …..
It is important to begin by saying …..
There are a number of things to consider when looking at the issue of…….
It makes sense to start by ……..

Stating Points

In my opinion ……
I consider …… important because ……
In my view ……….
I think that ……..
The main reason I’ve chosen ……. is ……….
On the one hand ….. on the other hand …..
An important point to consider is …..

Adding more points

Firstly …….
First of all …..
Secondly / Thirdly ……
Finally …….
In addition ……
What is more ……
Another point to consider is ……
I’d like to move onto …….
That’s all I have to say about that, now I’d like to move onto …..
Now I’d like to look at ….
This leads me to my next point ……

Summarizing

I’ve talked about ….
That brings me to the end of my …..
Well, that’s about it for now.
We’ve covered …..
To sum up ……
In general ….
On the whole …..

Relating end to the beginning

So I hope you’re clearer on …..
To return to the original question ….
So if we look at what I said in the beginning ....

Close

In conclusions then, it is clear that …..
To conclude, therefore, I would say that ….

Questions

Thank you for your attention, I’d be glad to answer any questions you might have.

Unable to answer questions

That’s an interesting question, I don’t actually know, but I’ll get back to you later.
Good question! I really don’t know! What do you think?
Unfortunately I’m not the best person to answer that.