English for Presentations: Explaining

Planning and outlining your presentation can greatly help your audience understand you, but what about the difficult, confusing parts? There are a few tools that can help.  In this unit we’ll look at how to give more detail, explain implications, simplify, use a different perspective, and give an example.

English for Presentations: Explaining

1. Giving more Detail
2. Explaining Implications
3. Simplifying
4. Using a different Perspective
5. Giving an Example
6. Referring to Information
7. Sample Presentation
8. English for Presentations: Menu

Giving more Detail

If you would like to expand on a certain concept, you can introduce your explanation with these useful expressions:

• Let’s consider this in more detail…
• Let’s look deeper into this …
• Let’s dive deeper …
• Let’s zero in on this…
• Why is this?

Explaining Implications

After giving raw data, you can explain the meaning and implications of that information with these:

• What are the implications?
• Think about the significance of this
• What does this mean for us?
• Where does that lead us?
• This means that…

Simplifying

Perhaps you have given them a lot of information or very complex data.  Or maybe you want to ensure they process the information a certain way.  Simplifying could work well for you here.

• I’d like to put the situation into some kind of perspective
• Whichever way you look at it,  it’s clear that…
• In other words…
• Another way of saying this is…
• Put simply, …
• In a nutshell, …
• In real terms…

Using a different Perspective

Sometimes, changing your perspective can help your audience understand better:

• Let’s look at this a different way
• Let’s look at this from a different angle
• Let’s look at this from a ___________ point of view
• Let’s consider their perspective
• Perhaps another perspective will shed some light on this
• What about …?

Giving an example

A good, visual example can clearly explain the most complicated theories.  Be sure to use them often.

• For example,…
• For instance,…
• A good example of this is…
• To give you an example,…
• To give you a picture of,…
• To illustrate this point…

Referring to Information

A picture is worth a thousand words.  But don’t forget about your charts, graphs, handouts, and diagrams:

• Let’s have a look at this chart
• Take a look at this diagram
• Could you turn your attention to your page 3 of your handouts
• This picture shows /  explains / illustrates…

Sample Presentation

Let’s put all that together in this example of a presentation of the thoroughly confusing concept of Bitcoin.  Using these tools, we’ll try to make the presentation easy to understand.

Well, I’ve told you about our strategy .  Now let’s move on to our digital currency initiatives.  Before we go any further, let’s dive deeper into digital currency.  What is digital currency? Digital currency is a virtual currency which is underpinned by cryptographic systems. They enable secure online payments without the use of third-party intermediaries. “Crypto” refers to the various encryption algorithms and cryptographic techniques that safeguard these entries, such as elliptical curve encryption, public-private key pairs, and hashing functions. Put simply, digital currency is safe, secure, easily transferrable form of money. A good example of this is Bitcoin, which is the most famous and the most valuable of all the digital currencies. Take a look at this chart which shows Bitcoin’s growth over the past 20 years. Impressive, isn’t it? What does this mean for us? Because digital currencies are growing at an astronomic rate, if we enter the market now, we can grow with it.  In other words, they represent explosive growth potential. Let’s look at this from a different angle.  If we don’t get into digital currencies now, we won’t be around tomorrow. What about risks? Let’s look at this a from a risk exposure point of view.  We can minimize the risk by ……………..

English for Presentations: Menu