Impress your audience without sounding like a show-off: 4 Tips for choosing and using effective vocabulary in your speeches and presentations.

"Jack has a proclivity of eschewing stipulated academic assignments"

Translation: "Jack doesn't do his homework"

 Using rich vocabulary correctly can do wonders for your clarity and credibility as a speaker. However, using vocabulary incorrectly or using unnecessarily complicated words (like in the quote above) can do the exact opposite. In this article, I cover a few methods you can employ as a guide to choosing and using words that will impress without irritating your audience.

Too often speakers script their speeches to be either too verbose or too simplistic. In either case, the message suffers. The English language is one of the most nuanced of the widely spoken modern languages. It allows for many subtle shades of meaning to get your point across. This makes it pregnant with descriptive and poetic power when words are combined skilfully in the spoken form. But there is skill involved.

Using the right words makes your speech crisp and clear adding to your credibility and ability to influence.

First and foremost - know your audience

Before we begin, a foundation point: first and foremost - know your audience. Their background, level of education, social affiliations and lifestyle, age etc. All this will help you to not just pick the right words, but to craft a successful presentation overall.

1. Use mono or bi-syllabic words.

People are suspicious of long, poly-syllabic words. You come across as pretentious and showy. However, most people will accommodate shorter words expecting that they should know what they mean. They might even look them up later to "remind" themselves. These words are also more likely to have been heard before by the audience. Words like trite, apt, terse etc. These words also tend to flow more with a conversational style of speaking which is generally more engaging and effective.

2. Provide context (Use my relative over absolute method).

Two ways I do this in my presentations and I recommend you try them.

i. Use words in pairs that complement each other.

My first exposure to the word "obtuse" was while listening to a political debate and one speaker described the other speaker's argument as "naive and obtuse"—fancy words for "stupid".

By pairing the less familiar word "obtuse" with the more familiar "naive", the speaker was able to communicate the essence of his thought with sophistication without losing the audience. After all, in the debate, the point was not so much for the other speaker to understand him (he probably did) but to discredit him before the audience. And to do that, the audience must understand him.

Pair your slightly more sophisticated or unfamiliar words with simpler everyday words to provide context.

ii. Spend time describing verbally before using a sophisticated word.

"She was a skilled singer who could hit high notes with ease and grace. Her sonorous voice carried through the halls of the theater delighting her audiences."

By describing her singing abilities up front, and then introducing the word sonorous in context, an audience member who does not know in absolute terms what sonorous means, can derive it relative to the rest of the description.

This elevates your authority (you know words they don't) while preserving the audience member's dignity and still getting your message across. The audience members who know what sonorous means will feel quite proud of themselves and those who do not can infer it's meaning from the context you provided.

3. Use your body.

In the above example - "Her sonorous voice carried through the halls of the theater delighting her audiences" - use 'wafted' instead of 'carried' while using your hands to create a wave pattern from one side to the other and the audience will understand because you have provided a visual context using your body.

I hope you see how this is so much better than simply saying her voice "sounded".

Provide context through description, pairing or body language when using a sophisticated word that enhances or encapsulates what you are describing.

4. Use onomatopoeia.

Onomatopoeia is the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named. That is, using words that sound like what they describe. For example, "cackle" instead of laugh or "sprightly" instead of cheerful. For example, in telling a story, you could talk about how your three year old "plopped" your watch in the toilet instead of just "tossed" or "dropped". "Plop" describes the sound and makes for a richer description. It also hints at the way the action was done.

Remembering number 3 point above, you might enhance this by using body language. Can you think of some ways you would do that?Using words that sound like what they describe can elevate your descriptive power without losing your audience. It also engages more senses especially the auditory.

At a more advanced level, I like to use words that are not strictly onomatopoeic (and yes, onomatopoeic is indeed a word :).

Instead, I may use a word that may be unusual but leverages words the audience already knows because they sound like them and have similar meaning. Try this out for yourself.

For example, "There was a paucity of food". Paucity sounds like "poor" and combined with some context before or after, the audience will intuitively understand even if the meaning is not explained.

Another example - "There was a dearth of food". Dearth sounds like death. Of course you can just say lack. But where's the fun in that?

In short, avoid unfamiliar words in isolation if they do not at all sound like what they mean. For example, saying a lady was very vivacious can be confusing to an audience member who does not know what vivacious means. It means merry but sounds too much like like vicious.

There are your four tips to help you impress your audience without sounding like a show-off.

Until the next article, speak with skill!