Giving a presentation in English can be nerve-wracking, especially when English isn’t your first language and you’re not sure of the commonly used expressions when giving a presentation, or if you’re simply not aware of the format. Today I’d like to help. I’d like to give you a basis for a presentation and some useful phrases you can use when giving a presentation.
Note: while some of the expressions use the word ‘talk’ you can simply remove it to use with an office or meeting presentation.
Greet your audience and thank them for coming
- Welcome, and thank you for taking the time out to come and see me and my talk. It’s great to see so many of you here.
- Firstly, let me thank you for coming here today. I hope you get something from my talk that you can take away and use.
- I’d like to welcome you all here today and thank you all for coming.
- It’s good to see so many faces here today and I’d like to thank you all for being here.
- Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming. I hope you will find this useful and go away with something to think about.
Introduce yourself
- For those of you who have not seen me before, I’d like to briefly introduce myself….
- To start, I’d like to tell you a little bit about myself and what I do…
- Secondly, I’m just going to say a few words about myself…
- Before we start, I’d like to tell you who I am, what I do, and why I am here…
Introduce your presentation
- Now, I’m going to talk to you today about…. and…..
- My talk today is going to be on…. and…..
- Today we are going to look at ….. and ……..
- I am here to talk about...
Outline your talk and save questions until the end
- In this talk I want to talk about …. and ways we can….. and how we….
- I’m going to talk about….
- We are going to look at …. and….. and lastly….
- I will firstly talk about ... and .... and then move on to ....
It’s important to make sure it’s clear that any questions be asked at the end. You can simply do this by saying:
If you do have any questions about anything that comes up, then please save them to the end where I will then try to answer them.
Linking the presentation
- Let's move onto…
- Now let’s look at…
- Moving onto...
- Moving away from… and to…
- Having talked about … let’s now talk about...
Referring back
- As I mentioned before…
- Going back to what I said on…
- And again if we go back to…
- So, let me say it again…
- Just like in…we also..
Highlighting key points
- As we can see in….
- … shows….
- If we look at… we can see..
- Between… and… we…
- What we see here is…
- Let’s focus on…
- If we draw our attention to..
- Let's highlight.....
Emphasising ideas
- This is SO important.
- This is PARAMOUNT.
- THIS is a must..
- This NEEDS TO...
- We HAVE TO…
- If we WANT TO… we.. HAVE TO…
- Let me MAKE it CLEAR…
- This is WITHOUT DOUBT..
Giving examples
- A perfect example of this is…
- If we look at … we can see…
- To highlight this we can see…
- For instance…
- Like...
Talking about improvements
- Not only does ... have ... but ..
- A major step is..
- We have managed to increase/improve….
- We have taken the next step. We have…
- Improvements we have made are..
- We are in the process of...
- We are working on...
- Every day we are....
Giving your opinion
- This is worrying.
- This is (very) alarming.
- This is an area we need to…
- I/we predict that…
- If the trend keeps going like this…
- In this area we have/need to...
Comparing
- In comparison with...
- If we take… and … we see..
- The changes between … and...
- In … we can see ... and....
Describing charts and numbers
Depending on your presentation you might need to describe trends in the form of graphs or charts. The language above for highlighting, emphasis, comparisons, and improvements is very useful when you are talking about numbers and visual data.
Summarising
- So, what is our message?
- So, what does this all mean?
- The key things to remember here are…
- Having looked at all of that. It’s important…
- To summarise….
- So, if we go back to the start...
Thank your audience and invite questions
- Again, I’d like to thank you all for coming today and if you have any questions, then I would be happy to answer them.
- I’d like to thank you for your time and if you have any questions, then I’d would be happy to answer them.
- Thank you for listening and if you have any questions, now is the time to ask.
- Thanks again for coming. This is the part where I try and answer any questions you might have, so feel free to ask.