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Making a Presentation

Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast number 57 – Making a Presentation.

This is English as a Second Language Podcast episode 57. I’m your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.

In this episode, we’re going to discuss giving a presentation for a business meeting or for a class in school. Let’s get started.

[start of story]

I don’t normally get stage fright, but the thought of getting up in front of my colleagues to give a presentation always gives me butterflies. But I have no choice; my boss asked me to do it, so I will.

I set up my projector and PowerPoint program on my laptop. Clearing my voice, I stood up and addressed the 10 people present at the meeting. I started off by saying, “Good afternoon. I want to thank you for inviting me to talk to you today.” I had a clicker in my hand to advance the slides. “Today I’m going to talk to you about our new product, Provasic. Please feel free to ask questions as we go along,” I said.

I then flipped through the slides showing pictures of our product, and concluded by summarizing the main points of my talk with bullet points. I finished by saying, “Thank you for your attention today. My contact information is on your handout.” Whew! I was glad that was over!

[end of story]

We talked today about giving a presentation at a business meeting, for example. I started by saying that I don’t normally get “stage fright.” “Stage fright,” two words, is when you get scared or nervous when you have to stand up in front of other people and talk. A “stage,” you know, is a place where you have a play in a theater, and “fright” is another word for “to be afraid.” “Stage fright,” then, is to be afraid of the stage, but here we use it more generally to mean anytime you are nervous, or anxious, or scared about standing up and talking to a group of people.

I said that I had to get up in front of – or stand up in front of – “my colleagues.” “My colleagues,” a noun, refers to the people that I work with or that are in the same profession as I am, the same job type as I am. These are my colleagues.

I said that when I have to get up in front to give a presentation, I always get “butterflies,” or it “gives me butterflies.” A “butterfly” is an insect that has beautiful wings. It’s small and many people – some people – try to catch butterflies with a big net. A “butterfly” comes originally from a cocoon and then it is sort of born out of a little cocoon, or little shell. Well, when we say, “I have butterflies in my stomach,” we mean that I feel – my stomach feels – a little bit nauseated. That is, I don’t feel very well. My stomach isn’t feeling very well because I am nervous, because I am scared of something. Usually, when you have to give a presentation, people get nervous, and sometimes they get “butterflies in their stomach.” It’s the expression we use to say that you’re starting to feel a little sick because you are so nervous.

“I set up my projector” – or I got my projector ready – for my “PowerPoint program.” A “projector” is a machine with a lens that shows the picture on a larger screen. You can have a “movie projector” – a projector in a movie theater. You can have a projector at a meeting connected to your computer. It shows something up on a big screen, a place where you watch a movie or look at pictures. “PowerPoint,” you probably know, is Microsoft software that is used for giving presentations.

I said I started my presentation by “clearing my voice.” “To clear your voice” means to go like this (clears voice), meaning to clear it so that you can speak more clearly. So, “to clear your voice” means to do what I just did so that your voice sounds better. I said that I stood up and I “addressed the 10 people present at the meeting.” “To address” means to talk to a group of people. I said they were “10 people present,” meaning 10 people who are there physically at the meeting. That word “present” means a gift, but here it means, it can also mean, to be somewhere, to actually be physically in a place. “There were students present at the – in the classroom.” That’s the meaning of “present” here.

I started off by saying, “Good afternoon. I want to thank you for inviting me to talk to you today.” “To start off” means to begin, you probably know. The expression “I want to thank you for inviting me” is a common way of starting a presentation if you were, in fact, invited to give a presentation. You start, often, by thanking people. “I want to thank you for inviting me today.”

I then said that I had “a clicker in my hand to advance the slides.” When you’re giving a presentation like a PowerPoint presentation, a “clicker” is a little device, usually smaller than your hand, that has buttons on it so you can go forward or backward in terms of the pictures or the “slides” that you are showing. In a PowerPoint presentation, we call each screen or each picture, if you will, a “slide.” Well, you can “advance the slides,” meaning go forward from one to two to three. You can also go back in your slides to go backwards: three, two, one. A clicker allows you to go back or forward. It’s usually like a remote control, really. A remote control is a clicker.

I began my talk by saying, “Today I’m going to talk to you about our new product” – a very common way of starting a presentation, after you thank people for their attention or inviting you, is to tell them what you’re going to talk about. “Today, I am going to talk to you about my new product,” whatever it is. I also used the expression, “Please feel free to ask questions.” That is a very polite way of telling someone that it’s okay for them to ask questions: to “feel free.” When someone says, “Please feel free to call me,” that means it’s okay for you to call me. I don’t mind.

I “flipped through the slides” showing pictures of my product. “To flip through” means to go through – usually, to go through more or less quickly. You can “flip through” slides. We normally – commonly, rather – talk about “flipping through a book” or “flipping through a magazine” – means you turn the pages very quickly just to get an idea about what is in the magazine or the book.

I said that I concluded “by summarizing the main points of my talk with bullet points.” “The point” of something is the main idea of something. So, when you say, “the main points,” you mean the main ideas of your talk. “Bullet points,” you probably know, “bullet points” is when, on a piece of . . . on a computer, on a word processing document, or on a slide in PowerPoint, you have little dots – little usually black dots – and these dots are “indented,” meaning they’re moved in a little bit from the edge of the page, and they’re used to list things. So, a “bullet point” is something that uses that format on a page.

I ended my presentation by saying, “Thank you for your attention today. My contact information is on your handout.” Again, a very common way of ending a presentation is to thank people for their attention. This means you are thanking them for paying attention to you, for listening to you, for not falling asleep. My students usually don’t pay attention to me. They are sleeping, or listening to their iPods, or text messaging their friends, and so forth. But you want to thank people for paying attention. “Thank you for your attention today” – it means the same.

“My contact information” is my name, my address, my telephone number – how you can contact or get in touch with me. I said that I put my contact information on a “handout.” That’s one word (handout), a noun which means a piece of paper that you give at a presentation or in a class that has information about your presentation on it. You can have “handouts” at a conference or any sort of presentation.

I ended by saying “Whew! (I’m) glad that was over.” That little sound that I made (whew!) is spelled (whew), and it’s an exclamation, if you will. It’s a sound that we make in English to express relief. “I’m so glad this day is over. Whew!” That’s how I make the sound. Other native speakers may make it differently, but when you see it in a book or see it in writing, it’s spelled (whew).

Now let’s listen to our story, this time at a normal speed.

[start of story]

I don’t normally get stage fright, but the thought of getting up in front of my colleagues to give a presentation always gives me butterflies. But I have no choice; my boss asked me to do it, so I will.

I set up my projector and PowerPoint program on my laptop. Clearing my voice, I stood up and addressed the 10 people present at the meeting. I started off by saying, “Good afternoon. I want to thank you for inviting me to talk to you today.” I had a clicker in my hand to advance the slides. “Today I’m going to talk to you about our new product, Provasic. Please feel free to ask questions as we go along,” I said.

I then flipped through the slides showing pictures of our product, and concluded by summarizing the main points of my talk with bullet points. I finished by saying, “Thank you for your attention today. My contact information is on your handout.” Whew! I was glad that was over!

[end of story]

Thanks to our great scriptwriter, Dr. Lucy Tse, for all of her hard work. And thanks to you for listening.

From Los Angeles, California, I’m Jeff McQuillan. Come back and listen to us again here on ESL Podcast.

ESL Podcast is produced by the Center for Educational Development in Los Angeles, California. This podcast is copyright 2006.