Information Accentuation Techniques

An informative speech need not necessarily be boring and dull. The speaker should help his audience be involved by highlighting most important information through special strategies called information accentuation techniques.

1. Emphasis

1. Intensification

   1. DEGREE – considerably, significantly, largely, strongly, fully, entirely, totally, extremely, absolutely, completely, radically, perfectly, primarily, purely

   2. SPECIFICATION – essentially (в сущности), immediately, particularly, fundamentally, uniquely, especially, truly, exactly, precisely, specifically

e.g. This technique is highly complex. This process strongly influences… This method is particularly important when …

2. De-intensification

   1. barely, fairly, hardly, merely, nearly, possibly, rather, simply, slightly, typically, normally, usually

e.g. This may possibly lead to … This is hardly acceptable. These two trends are slightly different.

3. Emphatic attitude

   1. certainly, clearly, definitely, of course, obviously, surely, surprisingly, unfortunately

e.g. This is clearly the best result. These data are definitely more important.

4. Stressing auxiliaries and negatives

   1. We do believe that this is the optimal variant.

   2. We have completed a series of tests.

   3. The results did confirm our initial assumptions.

   4. This method will not be used in our case.

Ex. 27. Use the techniques above to make the following sentences more emphatic.

1. Modern industrial civilization depends on petroleum and its products.

2. The sulfur content in this oil is low.

3. Seismic surveys are important exploration tools.

4. Water injection remains one of the most common enhanced oil recovery methods.

5. Gas injection is useful if oil is viscous.

6. Offshore drilling is common in the North Sea.

7. These production technologies do not provide high production rate.

8. We believe that here we deal with marine depositional environment.

9. It is clear that construction of a pipeline isn’t a good solution.

10. We won’t use perforation in this layer, because the gas condensate content is high.

11. Many of the Siberian oil reserves aren’t explored yet.

Ex. 28. Make up ten sentences in the context of oil and gas sphere illustrating the use of each of the four emphasis techniques given above.

2. Rhematization – main idea at the beginning

1. The thing is … / The point is … / The principle here is … / The problem we are trying to solve is as follows.

2. One important feature of … is … / One important thing must be mentioned before we go further. / One of the problems here is …

3. Another approach to solve this task is …

5. To compare the trends, we need more data.

6. Little is known about … / Little can be said about …

7. This is exactly the result we were trying to achieve. / This is exactly the moment when water begins to evaporate.

8. What really matters is …/ What we are proposing is../ What must be mentioned is that …

9. No solution has been offered so far.

Ex. 29. Change the following sentences so that the main idea is at the beginning.

1. We have been trying to achieve this production rate for a long time.

2. It must be noted that there are a few impermeable interlayers in this horizon.

3. There is another way to increase oil recovery, and that is to use gas injection.

4. Keeping production costs low is the main strategy of many companies.

5. We cannot say much about reservoir properties until we have core analysis data.

6. We have decided to use hydraulic fracturing to increase productivity of the wells.

Ex. 30. Make up five sentences in the context of oil and gas sphere with the rhematization techniques given above.