4 vocal tips to elevate your presentation

With delivery twice as important as the content itself, speakers must master volume, pitch, rate and enunciation. Here are techniques to land your message with the audience.

Ragan Insider Premium Content
Ragan Insider Content

When it comes to presenting, exceptional vocal delivery is essential.

Based on feedback from over 1,000 audience members following 120 executive speeches, the listeners were twice as concerned with the speaker’s vocal quality as with the content.

You can do more with your voice than you might think. Here are four tips for elevating your vocal delivery:

Pitch

Pitch is the placement of your voice on a musical scale—how high or low you speak—and it connects directly to our perception of the speaker’s passion. With speakers with a lot of pitch variety, we assume they care a lot about their presentation topic. When vocal pitch doesn’t vary much, we say a speaker is monotone, and that suggests he or she cares little about the topic. Your optimal pitch is what feels most comfortable and natural. From there, you can elevate your pitch to higher to convey excitement or energy or lower it for authority or seriousness.

Rate

To read the full story, log in.
Become a Ragan Insider member to read this article and all other archived content.
Sign up today

Already a member? Log in here.
Learn more about Ragan Insider.