Involving the audience
It is important to make the audience feel involved. You can do this by asking rhetorical questions and by referring to the audience personally.
Using rhetorical questions
Useful phrases:
Welcoming a speaker
A: Well, good morning, everyone. It’s good to have Martin Ferreira here from our office in Portugal. Some of you met him last year at the Spring conference. Welcome, Martin.
B: Thank you, Paul. It is great to be back in the UK.
Other phrases to introduce a speaker:
I’d like to introduce Mrs Samantha Singh, Marketing Director of our company.
I’d like to welcome Sam Brandt.
It’s a pleasure to welcome Greg Riconda.
Other ways of thanking someone:
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak to you today.
Welcoming visitors and introducing the speaker
Hello. Thank you all for coming. I hope you had a good journey here. There are some drinks on the table. Please help yourself.
Right. If everyone’s ready, let’s start. I’d like to introduce our speaker today, Mrs Samantha Singh, a student of Power Engineering Department. She’ll be talking to us about the problem of energy crisis.
Other phrases for greeting people:
Good morning, everyone. Welcome.
Hello. It’s good to see you all here.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Other ways of inviting people to take things include:
Please, take a leaflet.
Help yourselves to a brochure.
Other ways of getting people’s attention so that you can start:
Fine. If we’re all here, I’ll begin.
OK. Let’s get started (let’s make a start).
Saying who you are
Good afternoon. It is great to be here today. As you all know, I’m the Head of the Design Department. I’ve been in this job for four years. Before that I worked for another company in France for five years. I’m talking to you today as the manager of the team which developed this new product.
Starting with a personal story
How do we avoid problems? When I got out of my car this morning, I forgot to switch off the lights. However, an alarm in my car warned me that I had left them on. That means that when I leave here today my car will actually start.
So, the alarm reminded me about my mistake and I was able to act before an issue. That’s what we need in our company – systems that will warn us and show us potential problems, which we can then prevent. That’s what I am going to talk about today.
Other ways of introducing a story or interesting fact:
A funny thing happened to me the other day…
On the way here, I saw ..
I noticed in the news last week …
Starting with an interesting fact
I read something interesting the other day. Did you know that the tunnel which links England and France, was constructed using 13 000 engineers, technicians and workers? This showed amazing organisation and proves that cooperation between companies in different countries can achieve excellent results. So, let’s think about this example as we discuss our joint venture project with our partner company.
6. Giving background
Sam asked me to present my ideas for a new telephone system. As you know there have been problems with the old system – we’ve lost calls, we’ve had no records of those lost calls and overall the system can’t manage the large number of callers. I’ve spent the last two months researching the different systems available. Today I’d like to present a solution to you.