Tip: Linguistic tricks to improve virtual presenting

Credit: Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

You are not alone if you have ever felt bored or distracted when watching someone present a webinar or panel discussion online. Some people are better than others at holding people's attention - even on a Zoom call.

Yes, there are some natural born, gifted speakers. That helps for sure, but the reality is that it is a skill - and like any skill, there are techniques that can be learned. When done well, they can add polish and an engaging human layer.

International science journal, Nature, outlines some linguistic tricks you can use to grab your online audience's attention. That comes courtesy of Valerie Fridland, the professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, and Ruth Gotian, chief learning officer and assistant professor of education in anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine.

"Aside from varying your pitch, you can also make savvy use of words known as intensifiers — 'very,' 'really,' 'incredibly,' 'so' and 'absolutely,' for example. Intensifiers communicate intensity: why just describe something as ‘important’ when it could be ‘tremendously important’?" it reads.

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