Businesses use presentations to communicate with both their employees and external audiences. Remote presentations became the norm when coronavirus struck, with companies continuing to rely on business transcription agencies to convert the audio/video recordings into accurate, well-formatted documents. Whether it’s a pitch about a new product or project idea, it needs practice to deliver a good presentation. One of the most important things for a successful presentation is to engage and hold your audience’s attention. This is where transition words or speech transitions come in.
Purpose of Signalling or Transition Words
Making a presentation is not just about conveying a lot of knowledge. You need to link all the points together and convey your ideas clearly and concisely to your audience. Signalling or transition words are words, phrases and sentences that help your audience understand the flow of your speech or presentation. Using transitions in presentations helps to:
- Link different points or topics together
- Emphasize ideas
- Link to a story
- Move from one point to another
- Summarize or conclude
Good speech transitions allow your audience to understand the connection between the different ideas in your presentation.
Types of Speech Transitions
There are different types of speech transitions that can used in the introduction, outline, body, and conclusion of presentation, including language to refer to visual aids. Here are the most common types of transitions:
- Introduction – After you have welcomed the audience, you can introduce the presentation topic by saying: I am going to talk about… or the subject of my presentation is…
- The overview or outline – This transition is used to go move from the introduction of the presentation to the main part. You can say: I will divide my talk into three parts…or, let’s look at the reasons for this problem and three things we can do about it. At this point, you can also inform your audience about questions, by saying “There will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation”.
- The body – The next step is moving smoothly to the body or main gist of your presentation as well as its individual sections. Here are some examples:
- Introduce a main point by saying: ‘A major concern is’… or ‘The crux of the problem is’
- Go on to connect different points with: ‘The second concern is’… and ‘the third concern is’…
- To rephrase a main point – say: ‘Let me put that another way’… or ‘in other words…’
- Make a departure from the main topic with: Incidentally… or this reminds me about…
- Compare points with: Likewise… or similarly….
- Give an example: Let me give you an example of this… or take the case of…
- The conclusion – To conclude, you need to summarize the main points. Examples of transitions that can be used include: In conclusion…; to summarize…; therefore… thus, you can see that…
- References to visual aids – Presentations include visual materials such as diagrams, tables and other illustrations and using the right transitions is important to introduce them to your audience. Provide comments or explanations with phrases like: this graph shows…, the next slide illustrates…
Transitions are important and must be practiced in a team presentation, according to a manner of speaking. org article. The way a team makes a presentation shows how united the team members are as they work towards achieving their goal. When one member has finished speaking, an effective transition has to be used to bring the next member on stage. The key points to include in the transition are:
- A brief summary of the part covered by the member who has spoken
- Name and designation of the next speaker
- A brief outline of what they will present
Crafting effective transitions depends upon identifying the words or phrases to indicate the logical connections between the main points of your presentation. A digital transcription service provider can provide you with an accurate text version of everything voiced in your presentation to ensure a quality record and also enhance access to the content.
