Choosing words and sentence structures.
Choosing words and sentence structures. Avoid long, complicated sentences, and use straightforward sentence structure (subject-verb-object) as much as possible. Listeners prefer action verbs and concrete nouns to abstractions. You may need to deal with abstract ideas, but try to provide concrete examples for them (20c).
Shuqiao Song’s presentation script included the following example:
student writing
Now, to argue my second point, I’ll begin with an image. This is a René Magritte painting. The text means, “This is not a pipe.” Is this some surrealist Jedi mind trick? Not really. Now listen to the title of the painting to grasp Magritte’s point. The painting is called The Treason of Images. Here Magritte is showing us that “this is not a pipe” because it is an image of a pipe.
Her short, straightforward sentences and vivid word choice (“Jedi mind trick”) help make this passage easy on listeners.