husen Last updated: 35 Powerful Presentation Phrases in English for Engaging Your Audience
Your palms are sweating.
For a moment, your mind goes blank.
All eyes are on you.
That moment right before you start presenting – as you take in your audience – is usually the scariest. The nervousness lessens with practice, but even the most frequent public speakers still get butterflies in their stomach sometimes. Whether you’re facing an entire room of people or looking at everyone through your laptop screen, giving a presentation can still be intimidating – or exciting, once you move beyond the fear.
There’s an extra layer of challenge too if you have to speak in your non-native language. For a more professional-sounding and engaging presentation, we’ve compiled some of the most useful English presentation phrases below.
We’ll also explore what else you can do to make even more of an impact on your audience. With the right intonation, body language, and gestures, you’ll really be able to catch their attention and emphasize your points.
If this sounds interesting to you, you should check out the Creativa business meeting mastery course. There’s an entire video episode about giving a stunning presentation. You’ll learn about how to structure your ideas, deliver a report, and conclude a discussion. It covers not only fluent native phrases but also body language demonstrations that you can apply to your work right away.
On top of this, the course has plenty of other engaging, high-quality video episodes that help you present your best self in English. Curious about it? You can access a free video here.
Delivering a Powerful Presentation
To lay the groundwork for your presentation in English, here’s what you’ll have to do first:
Consider the audience
You’re probably always going to need slides, but every presentation will be different – and the audience that you’ll be presenting to won’t always find the same points interesting. Because of this, you’ll have to tailor your message to them. What style of presentation would be a good fit? For example, some audiences would want to see a lot of number-crunching, while others might be looking for more personal storytelling.
Prepare a structure
Structure is key in presentations. People have short attention spans, and they can be forgetful. At the end of the day, your goal is for them to remember at least the main points in your presentation. What message do you want to convey? Since you might be discussing a lot of information, you can make it more digestible by ensuring that there’s a logical progression and then ending with a summary.
Whatever your topic is, it’ll benefit from having a well-defined structure to guide your audience from start to finish. For a cheat sheet on this, scroll down here to download a free PDF worksheet with exercises about structuring your presentation so you can be clear and convincing. This way, you can have a presentation that’s strong in all sections – beginning, middle, and end.
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Key Business Phrases
Once you’ve decided on the style and message of your presentation, you can take it up a notch by including certain English presentation phrases all throughout. Let’s break it down from start to finish:
Introduction
This is when you’ll be warming up your audience before you proceed to your main points.
Greeting the audience
If you’re presenting to people who aren’t too familiar with you, you can quickly introduce yourself and mention your role or company.
Examples:
- Good morning, everyone. I’m glad to be able to present to all of you.
- Hello, everyone! It’s nice to see all of you today. I’m [name], the [position] from [company].
Describing your topic
After greeting the audience, you’ll be explaining to them what your presentation is all about. To set their expectations, you might show them an outline of the talk and mention if there’ll be any activities such as breakout discussions.
Examples:
- I’ll be talking about…
- I’ll be talking about our financial metrics over the past year.
- The topic of this presentation will be…
- The topic of this presentation will be major trends in the logistics industry.
- I’ll be discussing first the [first topic], next [second topic], and finally [third topic].
- I’ll be discussing first the project’s ideation process, next our initial trial, and finally, presenting our results.
Addressing questions and technical concerns
People might be wondering if they can ask questions during your presentation, so you can clarify this at the start. If you’re providing handouts or presenting online, it’s useful to ask people to alert you about any technical concerns.
Examples:
- Please feel free to ask any questions during the talk.
- For questions, there will be a Q&A section at the end.
- Can all of you see and hear me properly? Please let me know if you have any technical difficulties during the presentation.
Body
The body will make up the bulk of your presentation. Ideally, you would go through each of your points logically while letting your audience know when you’re moving on to the next section.
Sequencing
The longer your presentation, the more important it is to use sequencing phrases. These act as cues that let your audience know where you are in the presentation. You can think of these as similar to detour signals that make the audience much more likely to get your meaning.
Examples:
- First, let’s discuss the…
- First, let’s discuss the initial spark for this idea.
- Moving into [the next item / point] …
- Moving into item 4, we can see that this is a major pain point for our target market.
- This leads us to the next…
- This leads us to the next section, where we’ll be looking at the facts and figures.
Linking
Linking is closely related to sequencing. Similar to writing, you can have a smoother presentation by connecting your ideas rather than suddenly jumping from one point to another. You can also refer back to points that you’ve mentioned before to make your presentation more cohesive.
- In connection to what I said earlier…
- In connection to what I said earlier about growing our online presence, we can now look into potential social media campaigns.
- What this means is…
- What this means is that most of our growth is coming from a certain sector. Let’s analyze the data for this in the next section.
- This ties in with…
- This ties in with our survey findings about user reactions. I’ll go into detail about changes we’ve made to the app as a result.
Giving examples
To fully convey your point, you can bring up specific examples and case studies. These are much more memorable as well as engaging because you can tell these in the form of a story.
- For example…
- For example, costs were reduced significantly when we switched to the following materials.
- To demonstrate this point…
- To demonstrate this point, I’ll be showing you a video of a business that used this problem-solving method.
- Here’s an example of…
- Here’s an example of a seasonal product that our customers loved.
Showing visuals
Visuals naturally attract people’s attention. If you’re using slides for your presentation, take the opportunity to include images, diagrams, infographics, or even charts.
- As you can see from this…
- As you can see from this photo, we’ve redesigned our office space.
- Here’s a diagram / picture / chart that shows…
- Here’s a diagram that shows a high percentage of people are comfortable with online shopping.
- If you look at this…
- If you look at this infographic, you can see that the new color palette comes off as fun and casual.
Citing data
Citing data from research makes your presentation more persuasive. When you’re talking about results that you’ve achieved, try to bring up actual numbers – this can go a long way towards impressing your audience.
Examples:
- According to this study…
- According to this study from [journal], 65% of eCommerce companies are looking for more efficient payment methods.
- Based on our research…
- Based on our research, the most enthusiastic buyers of wellness products in this city are in the 20 to 30 age range.
- Looking at the data…
- Looking at the data, you’ll notice that there’s been an 18% spike in sales since we migrated our platform.
Restating an idea
Sometimes you’ll want to restate an idea so it’s easier to understand. This also serves to emphasize it. Because of the repetition, people are more likely to remember it compared to if you’d only mentioned it once.
Examples:
- In other words…
- In other words, partnering up with this client can make our operations more efficient and seamless.
- Another way of saying this is…
- Another way of saying this is that there might actually be more demand than supply by next year.
- What I mean is…
- What I mean is we’re already more than halfway to our business objective.
Handling technical issues
When you’re presenting on video call, all kinds of glitches can happen. Someone might have connection issues, you might have to figure out an app feature you’ve never used before, or background noises might keep interrupting your call. The phrases below can be very handy in these kinds of situations.
- If you can’t hear me, can you type in the chat, please?
- Could everyone mute their mic? There’s a lot of background noise.
- Sorry. The call dropped. I’m back through.
Concluding the Presentation
By this time, the hardest part is already over! Still, you’ll have to wrap up your presentation nicely by going over the key takeaways during the conclusion. Your audience might also have questions that they’ll want you to address.
Summarizing the presentation
Out of everything that you’ve discussed, what would you like people to get out of it? A short summary towards the end serves to highlight your main ideas.
Examples:
- To wrap up…
- To wrap up, I’d like to point out three major takeaways.
- As a summary…
- As a summary of this report update, I would say we have seen a positive uptick in our workflow and productivity.
- All in all…
- All in all, we believe we’ve seen good results for this stage of our progress.
Thanking the audience
Similar to your greeting at the start, it’s common to address your audience again towards the end by thanking them for their time.
Examples:
- Thank you for listening!
- Thank you to everyone for being here.
- I’d like to thank you all for coming here.
Addressing questions
If you’re open to questions from your audience, you can have a short question-and-answer session after your presentation.
Examples:
- Do you have any questions or clarifications?
- Feel free to ask me about any of the points I made during the presentation.
- Let me know if you have any questions.
Practice is Crucial
When you’re all set with the content of your presentation, the next step is to practice your delivery. Regardless of how well you know the topic of your presentation, practicing it at least once will help you be more confident. You’ll discover potential issues that you can fix too before you go live.
Do a run-through
The most basic way to practice is to do a run-through of your entire presentation. Set a timer on your phone, open up your slides, then start talking – all while imagining that you’re already presenting to your audience. Since you’re acting as if it’s in real-time, this means avoiding any pauses where you have to look up information.
A run-through can pinpoint any weaknesses in your presentation, and you’ll notice any parts where you might be uncomfortable talking. You’ll also be able to see how much time you’ve spent so you can pace yourself accordingly.
Record yourself
A more intensive version of the run-through basic would be to record yourself presenting. You can either record your voice or take a full video of yourself. People often notice that they use filler words a lot such as “um” or “uh.” You’ll also be able to check your pronunciation and whether you sound confident and natural all throughout.
Since body language can make or break your delivery, watching a video of yourself presenting is an incredibly effective way to improve your performance. Do your facial expressions match what you’re saying? Are you maintaining good posture throughout and making efforts to connect with the audience?
When you combine a confident, approachable body language with the right business vocabulary, your ideas shine through better than ever. You can get a play-by-play of how exactly to do this with the Creativa business meeting mastery course. It features video sections that are all about making powerful transitions and expressing your points clearly during presentations. You’ll learn about specific native English phrases and gestures so you can move fluidly from one idea to the next.
Together with the other episodes, the course dives deep into how you can be a strong communicator during professional meetings. For a preview, check out this free episode.
Presenting on Video Call
Technical issues happen often enough in face-to-face presentations, but they’re even more frequent during video calls. To avoid any awkward delays when you’re presenting, get comfortable with the platform that you’ll be using.
If it’s a face-to-face presentation, double-check your slides and make sure any images or videos are showing properly. For video calls, try doing a test call on the app or even call up a friend to practice. You can also get familiar with the app’s basic features, such as screen-sharing or inviting people to breakout rooms.
But sometimes, even when you’ve practiced your presentation perfectly on video call, the unexpected can still happen. Scroll down here to download a free worksheet that we made precisely for dealing with technical issues in presentations. You’ll get an extensive list of English phrases to use for all sorts of video call glitches, along with practical tips for handling them in the moment. With enough preparation, you’ll be able to roll with surprises and conquer even video call presentations.
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Let’s explore some of the most common glitches (and how you can deal with them gracefully!):
Situation 1: You’re having a hard time hearing other people because of their laggy connection.
For a presentation to work, everyone needs to have a decent internet connection. If someone’s connection drops, they won’t be able to see or hear you properly, and you won’t understand what they’re trying to say, either. In this case, let them know right away that you can’t hear them. You can also ask them to talk to you over chat instead.
Example Phrases:
- [Name], you’re cutting in and out. Would you mind reconnecting?
- Audio problems – can you type it on chat instead?
Situation 2: You get disconnected from the call.
In the case that it’s your connection that’s faulty, you might have to disconnect then reconnect your call. This can be awkward because it interrupts the flow of your presentation. Alerting your audience using certain English phrases can reassure them while getting you back on track with what you were saying.
Example Phrases:
- Sorry, guys, dropped call. But I’m back.
- Connection problems, everyone. Gonna log out and back in.
Situation 3: People are having a hard time figuring out how to turn on their audio or video.
Another reason why you’d want to be really familiar with the video platform is you might have to coach people when they experience glitches. It’s almost expected that a few people might accidentally forget to turn on their mic while speaking. Alternatively, they might have issues with turning on their camera.
Example Phrases:
- I can’t see you, [name]. [Give instructions on how to turn on their video.]
- I can’t see you, Fatima. Look for the camera icon and make sure there’s no red line through it.
- Typing in chat: “Make sure your mic’s unmuted.” [Clarify how they’ll know if they’re unmuted.]
- Typing in chat: “Make sure your mic’s unmuted. There should be no red lines through it.
Summary
The best presentations excel in all three areas: content, structure, and delivery.
Including some of the key English phrases above will upgrade your performance. Aside from setting a professional tone, these English presentation phrases set the pace for your audience so they’re aware of where you are in the discussion. Your message will sound clearer, and your audience will be able to follow your ideas better.
The basic rules for presentations are the same, whether you’re on a video call or stepping in front of a stage. With the tips above, you’re all set to prepare an amazing presentation in English.
