Communication Skills Tip: Emphasizing key words

In Lanartco's tip of the week February 18th, 2009, I underlined the importance of emphasizing certain words in our speech. Those words are called content words and they are the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. It might sound like you'd be stressing every other word in your speech if this were the case. The rule goes one step further towards something we call "focus words." Yes, content words are stronger than structure words (prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, etc.), however, focus words are THE keywords in any phrase and they usually are content words. Maybe this sounds confusing, but if you listen to any public speaker, politician or entertainer, you will hear them use this technique. America's current president, Barack Obama, is a wonderful example of someone who knows how to use emphasis on key words. He does three very important things on those words: he makes the stressed syllable in that word longer, louder and higher in pitch. This is how we help our listeners turn their attention to our most important points. Think about stressing your focus words next time you are speaking in public. To be added to Lanartco's Communication Performance Tip of the Week, please connect to this link or send your email address to info@lanartco.com