Use the Power of Analogy as Evidence In Presentations

Whenever you can, use analogies to support the points you are making.  People remember vivid mental images longer than they remember words.

Rerun from April 4, 2016

Accent Reduction- Get Inspired to Master These English Speech Sounds

Here is some information about the English language which will give you inspiration for mastering particular sounds:

1. The most frequently spoken consonant is “n.”
2. The “e” is the most commonly used letter in the English language. Furthermore, as many as one in eight of all the letters written in English is “e.”   Why are there so many letter “e”s.  Remember, we have words with silent “e”s  (cake, wade), digraphs (beat, meet), and many prefixes and suffixes are spelled with an “e” (delightful, planted, basement).
3. More English words begin with the letter “s” than any other letter of the alphabet.
4. The following sentence contains seven different spellings of the speech sound, the American long vowel “e”: He believed Caesar could see people seizing the seas.
5. “Pronunciation” is one of the words most frequently mispronounced in the English language. That’s because the verb is “pronounce” and people use that  “ou” as in “ow” instead of the American short vowel “u.”

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

Check out our new advanced weekly speech tip program, our new subscription called ClearTalk Weekly, www.subscription.cleartalkmastery.com

Rerun from March 9, 2016

Presentations: Get and Use These Five Kinds of Evidence

To support or back up your viewpoint or recommendations, use these 5 kinds of evidence:

Personal experience or story

Analogy

Judgment of Experts

Examples

Statistical Facts

Rerun from March 28, 2016

English Communication: Get More of Backstory for Those Unusual Spellings of English Words

Does understanding how changes came about in the English language make the pronunciation and spelling easier for you?  Yes!  It gives you the patterns for whole sets of words.

And, oh my! … the reasons for changes in the English language are fascinating.

Big change in a good number of English words started in the 11^th century, when French became perceived to be the high-class or prestigious language.   That was when much of our culinary or cooking, legal, and poetic vocabularies became filled with French words.

Then came the Renaissance when scholars fell in love with the ancient classics.  They started borrowing large numbers of words.  Thus, many of our scientific and technical terms come from Latin and Greek.  Most of the Greek words came first through Latin, with Latin ideas of how to spell them.

Scholars decided that words already in the language should imitate their heritage of Latin and Greek.  They figured that “peple” originated with the Latin “populus.”  Thus the spelling should imitate the original word.  So an “o” was added to make it “people.”

In like manner  “det” got it’s “b” from “debitum”

Many words had letters added:  “indi(c)table,” “fau(l)t.”

Sometimes the words changed their pronunciation to match the spelling as in “fault.”

A note for you.  Sometimes the re-spellers were right about the origins of the word or etymology.  And sometimes they were wrong.  Ile became “isle” because the original word comes from “insula” (thus the sa).  However, “island” was not originally “insula.”  Instead it is from Old English “iegland.”

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

Check out our new advanced weekly speech tip program, our new subscription called ClearTalk Weekly, www.subscription.cleartalkmastery.com

Rerun from March 2, 2016

Successful Speaking Means You Must Provide Evidence for Your Viewpoint or Recommendations

Evidence is what makes what you have to say interesting and believable. Evidence makes your presentation persuasive and memorable.

Rerun from March 21, 2016