When you give presentations, the way you signpost and transition from one section of the presentation to the next will help your English communication sound professional, structured and confident.
The signposting and transitions are like the wardrobe for your content, giving a framework in which to ‘hang’ your key messages and give them support. They guide the audience, so they know where you are, when you are bridging to your next point or changing to a new topic, so we are managing their expectations.
This can particularly help the audience and ensure they keep following you, stay engaged, focused on the most important points, and so they do not start to lose interest, or sneakily start looking at their emails or to-do list!
This is particularly important for virtual presentations to international teams, or when in meetings run in hybrid format (some people in the room, some people joining virtually) when you can usually just see the presenter’s slides clearly, but the person speaking is only a small part of the screen, or hidden, depending on the virtual platform.
We can effectively transition in a presentation through a variety of words and phrases to flag where we have been focusing and what is coming next. These phrases can be used to create the structure and elevate the presentation style to deliver an impactful and polished impression. Here I share my recommended key phases for each type of transition.
Give more detail on a point:
- Expanding on this information…
- To go back to what I said earlier…
- To elaborate about the features…
- Allow me to give you some more detail on this…
- Coming back to…
- I’d like to draw your attention to…
- Perhaps I should mention…
Extra info off the key topic:
- Just moving off topic for a minute…
- If you would allow me to digress a moment…
- That’s just made me think of…
Summarise a section:
- So that brings us to a close on…
- To recap this section…
- Clearly what we can see from this is…
- The lesson we can learn from this is…
- That’s all I want to say for now on this.
Bridge to next section
- To move onto my next point…
- Moving onto….
- Now let’s turn to the topic of….
- This leads me to my next point, which is…
- Turning our attention now to…
Any questions or need more help on communicating confidently in your presentations in your international team? Contact me to chat further about how I can help you.
