Writing Tips for Presenters: Easy ways to make messages ear-friendly

Writing can be a great tool for making messages stronger. That means it's also a gift to the audience.

When we write a message word-for-word, we can zero in on exactly how we want to say something. We can organize and fine-tune our word choice. Then, even if we boil that text down to bullet points and deliver from an outline, our better sentences will tend to come out more readily.

Writing helps even more when a text is ear-friendly. Listening to a sentence is different from reading it to yourself on the page. A listening audience has to be able to grasp the meaning and keep up as you go along. They have no option to pause and rewind.

In our Executive Seminar, we spend time working on ways to make a speaker's text easier for audience members to digest. Here are three tips we teach that are especially easy to apply.

1. Take out conjunctions

Speakers love to link their ideas, creating compound sentences. For saying those lines out loud, it's usually better to delete conjunctions and create a series of shorter sentences.

To experience the difference, start by reading this first draft of a sentence from a presentation out loud:

Under the current model, customers have to ship radioisotopes to a center that could be located across the country and that increases transit time, shipping costs, and risk when we can start providing this service and eliminate all of these issues for the customer and at the same time, we create a stronger bond with our customers and generate a new revenue stream.

While you could certainly make other edits, see how drastically the text improves when we remove conjunctions. Try reading this version out loud:

Under the current model, customers have to ship radioisotopes to a center that could be located across the country. That increases transit time, shipping costs, and risk. We can start providing this service and eliminate all of these issues for the customer. At the same time, we create a stronger bond with our customers and generate a new revenue stream.

Your text now has those all-important pauses built in. You are not asking the audience to track with one giant thought. You're giving them a series, instead.

Express some numbers with words

We've written here before about how managing numbers helps audiences know what to do with them. One way to reduce the quantity of numbers you're using in a presentation is to replace some of them with words.

For example:

12 becomes a dozen

10 years is also a decade

100 years can also be a century

So in the first draft of a sentence, you might have:

After 12 trials involving 600 patients over the last 12 months, we achieved 33% reduction in emergency room visits.

That could read something like this when you replace numbers with words:

After a dozen trials involving 600 patients over the last year, we reduced emergency room visits by a third.

Here's one important consideration any time we deliver numbers in a text: What kind of impact do we want the number to have? That should also influence how you express it. For example, it's hard to think that the book One Hundred Years of Solitude would sound quite the same if it were called A Century of Solitude.

Reduce ly words by using better verbs

You may recall that those words ending in "ly" are called adverbs. You might also remember that adverbs are used to describe verbs. It's easy to make a quick scan of your first draft, circle the "ly" words, and ask yourself if a different verb might be able to do the work of two words.

For example,

"walked loudly" might become stomped

"moved quickly" could become hurried or rushed

"spoke slowly" might work as drawled

This quick edit helps you accomplish two things: Reduce the number of words in your sentence and identify a stronger verb. Both are wins for your listeners.