Verbal communication 101 — the good, the bad and the ugly

Do you have a great idea to pitch to your management? Were you asked to lead a training for newcomers in your team? Or maybe you are presenting at a conference? All of these are stressful experiences that you don’t want to mess up.

The first step to success is having solid information and being prepared to answer any questions that may come your way. Got that covered? Good. It seems that you have perfected WHAT you’re going to say, but what about HOW are you going to say it?

Let’s try something. Go back to the most boring high school lecture or online class you can remember. Now, compare that to the most exciting one you’ve ever witnessed, what made it so much more exciting & memorable?

Hi, my name is Daniels (the “s” is silent) and verbal communication in the professional world is a life-long passion of mine.

During the last 5 years, I’ve been actively doing all sorts of training, workshops, and presentations. Throughout this time, one thing I noticed was the kind of impact good communication skills can have on your audience and today, I’m more than happy to share with you all my favorite tips so that you can deliver presentations as memorable & exciting as the one you just recalled.

The 5 Main Attributes of Communication

Now the whole area of communication and presentation skills is quite broad and includes a lot of different things to keep in mind at the same time. Currently, the majority of the communication you’re doing has migrated online. One thing, however, that was left almost unchanged is verbal communication or the way you use your voice to present the information.

If we go in-depth (I know, exciting…), verbal communication as a subject can turn out to be very intricate and complicated, so let’s actually not do that for now. If I could boil verbal communication down to the basics, I would be left with the following 5 things — volume, pitch, tone, clarity, and rate. This is not the complete list, but these are the areas that I’ve found to have the biggest impact on your audience.

Volume

How loud or soft you speak. If you speak very softly, it will be hard for the audience to hear what you’re saying. If you speak loudly, you will notice people trying to get farther away from you.

Pitch

The attribute of sound, ordered on a scale from low to high. You can think about the notes on a musical score with the pitch getting higher as you move up the scale. If you’re not very musical, think of the sound that a knife scraping glass can make and you’ll get something very high-pitched.

Tone

The way you can add character to your speech. Think of tone as the color of your voice, it helps you to show your attitude towards something, express your emotions and add extra meaning. Much like the way a painting done in one color can be bland and boring (sorry Mr. Malevich!) speaking in a monotonous manner can get your audience bored and inattentive.

Clarity

The unique combination of speaking habits that a person might have. Clarity can be impacted by such things as mumbling, verbal detractors, going in circles and the use of jargon. While some of these are quite obvious, some might need more explanation.

When people hear the words “jargon” or “slang”, some might immediately think of street lingo. Actually, in your work environment, there are a lot of words you use on a day-to-day basis with your colleagues that might not make a lot of sense to people outside of your organization or field of work — those would also be considered jargon. Using these with people who are new to this lingo, can leave them scratching their heads in confusion.

Verbal detractors, also known as filler words, are verbal tics used by our brains as a placeholder when we need to think about what we are going to say next. These are the uhs, ums, ers, so’s and likes that the speaker is usually unaware of. Whilst okay to some extent, if overused, they can become incredibly distracting for the audience. Or even worse, they could eventually become a drinking game where every time you say “but um”, your audience takes a shot. A potentially fun activity for sure, but unfortunately only for the audience.

Rate

The speaking speed which is measured in words per minute from slow to fast. On paper, the average speaking rate when presenting or training goes around 100 to 150 words per minute. In practice, it is a bit more complicated than that— a speaker needs to be able to mix and match different speaking speeds. Speak too slow and you’ll notice your participants falling asleep. Speak too fast and they’ll struggle to catch up with what you’re saying. Speak at the same pace and you’ll see them switching attention to something else.

Now you might say — “This is great, Daniels, and to be honest a bit concerning, but how do I get better at this?
Well… the answer isn’t so simple. There is a quick fix you can apply straight away and there is a long path to improvement.

Taking steps in the right direction

Quick fix

More often than not, the things mentioned above can be caused by stress and anxiety that naturally come with presenting to a group of people. A quick fix for that would be getting used to pauses in your speech. Pauses are great, I love pauses! I love them for how versatile and helpful they are.
A pause can:

• Allow you to gather your thoughts
• Replace a filler word
• Help you think of an answer to the question
• Create suspense that will spark interest in the room
• Help the audience process the information
• Prepare the audience for what’s coming next

Ironically, I can talk about pauses all day, but at this point you’ll just have to believe me that they are good for you. A lot of people can feel intimidated by pauses because they think that they’ll look unprofessional or unprepared if they pause to think, so instead, they just keep talking non-stop.

In reality, your listeners won’t even notice that you’ve paused for 2–3 seconds in the first place and will treat it as a chance to process the information. If this doesn’t sound convincing, keep a glass of water next to you at all times when presenting and just take an occasional sip when you feel that you need to recollect your thoughts. This will help you check how the audience reacts to you taking a moment to be quiet.

The long path to improvement

Now if we go back to improving your speaking voice, quick fixes can be great workarounds, but not a proper solution. The only foolproof way to get better at speaking is… practice.
Yup, you’ve heard me right. I know, you may have been looking for a ready-made solution or maybe a great secret, but in the wise words of Mr. Ping from Kung Fu Panda:

Mr. Ping: The secret ingredient is… Nothing.
Po: …Huh?
Mr. Ping: You heard me, nothing. There is no secret ingredient!
Po: Wait, wait. It’s just plain old noodle soup? You don’t add some kind of special sauce or something?
Mr. Ping: Don’t have to. To make something special, you just have to believe it’s special.

The takeaway here is that no secret ingredient is needed if you’ve spent years mastering your noodle-cooking skills. Do something enough times and you’ll find that what is considered “masterful” has become second nature. Simply put, it’s about bringing all the ingredients beautifully together — that’s the real secret ingredient.

Or it might’ve been about believing in yourself, but this doesn’t help me prove my point, so I’ll ignore it.

A great starting point would be recording yourself speaking or rehearsing the presentation. Replay these recordings over and over and be brutally honest with yourself.

This way you will be able to notice and iron out a lot of aspects of your speech — speaking in monotone, being too fast or too slow, using a lot of filler words or jargon and more. At the end of the day, this will also help you feel prepared and more relaxed for the next time you will be presenting in front of the audience.

Some parting thoughts

Having said all of that, I will still leave you with a couple of tips to consider:

• Play with the volume of your voice to highlight and create contrast. GO LOUD to make a point, emphasize and impact your listeners. Speak softly to create contrast and draw your audience in.
• Vary your pitch and tone to bring life to your presentations. People love listening to stories, so tell them a story instead of reading an obituary!
• Remember to keep your filler words in check. Keep your sentences short and present information logically. Speak in your own words to clarify jargon.
• Change your speaking rate to keep the participants engaged. When presenting very important information it is generally better to be slow rather than fast.
• And to wrap up — use pauses! Pauses are great.