Utilise active tense for powerful audience experience
They will want more...
The language tense we use either includes the audience and commands attention and participation or, excludes them, usually resulting in glazed eyes, because what else is there to do when boredom sets in, except stare into thin air?
To ensure you are not guilty of the glazed eye sin, check your language for the balance of passive and active tenses. Active tense involves your audience and encourages contribution. Passive tense is useful to defuse the energy in a room and to detach people from their experience but over used it will create a lack lustre energy within the room.
It is amazing how quickly a presenter can reduce an active energetic audience to a room full of lethargic bodies. I am sure you have never been guilty of this crime, but I have. Read the following three sentences and check out your internal responses to them. Do they have the same effect?
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One can make picture mentally (passive)
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You can make pictures mentally (passive)
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Pictures can be made mentally (half active)
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Make mental pictures... now (active)
Check your language... is it active? Oh.. and remember to smile, active language is encouraged when we smile!
Words to avoid -
cliff hangers can be great fun but not when you are on the receiving end and dangling over the edge, waiting...
Starting sentences with: 'It is because that...' makes them very hard to follow and is liable to generate confusion. Generally speaking, short sentences with short words evoke direct action. If you haven't already done so, go now and read the section on Soundbites.
Consider this: Longer sentences, with more words in them, perhaps with a number of dependent clauses which alter the sense of the sentence as it goes along, not too much mind you, but just enough to make the whole thing an exercise in long distance sense retention, (if indeed there was any short distance at the start), can actually get away with leaving out the point of the sentence, because you have forgotten the start by the time you have reached the end! I hope that makes the point.