Active Language – Why You Should Avoid Too Many Nouns in Presentations

I find it a nuisance of the first degree when large piles of unattractive terms repeatedly obstruct my view of meaning and message during presentations. Do sentences like this sound so familiar to you: "On the subject of controlling, it should be said that the up-to-dateness of the data is of the utmost importance for your success..."? Active language means finding alterbative formulations for unwieldy nouns.

Why inexperienced speakers use a lot of nouns

Can it be a coincidence that inexperienced or even stressed speakers come to this difficult to digest with somnambulistic certainty, since noun-heavy language to find? What so often prevents us from being stimulated with active language?

Some time ago, a message caught my eye wissenschaft.de into the hands. German and Spanish researchers have discovered that in the human brain, time and main words are stored separately in different areas.

Too many nouns prevent us from understanding

It has long been known that babies can name and thus pronounce comprehensible things first – children often struggle with verbs even as three-year-olds. And this is how my thesis comes about: Under stress, the adult brain first falls back on the "older" entries when speaking. The result: the listeners are bombarded with nouns that are difficult to process.

How to avoid noun debris in the fusiform gyrus

Is this stress of talking inevitable? Is active language impossible at the moment of presentation? Speaking in front of an audience setzt selbst routinierte Redner “unter Strom. Der Anblick frontal sitzender und erwartungsvoll blickender Zuschauer löst im Gehirn uralte Notprogramme aus. Gegen diese Übermacht ankämpfen? Unmöglich. Wo ist die Tür? … Schon pocht das Herz, der Atem fliegt, der Schweiss bricht aus. “Du hast Dich nicht unter Kontrolle!”, funkt der Verstand. “Das sind doch nur Kollegen!”

But this reassuring news rarely falls on fertile ground. The "system" is now more preoccupied with itself than usual: Do I have all the facts ready? Have I taken all expectations into account? Why is my throat dry? Where to put your hands? Sounds my Voice also loud enough? This irritation quickly tempts the language center to fall back on "safe" things. They already guessed it, they are the main words that are also ready in emergencies... – and already the participants hear what they feared: a boring presentation because it is difficult to understand, peppered with many nouns and noun sentences.

What does the speaker experience on stage now? Guess. The worst of all fears comes true: the audience does not react! – And that stresses again, a vicious circle has begun.

Convert nouns to active verbs

Which typical noun-heavy sentences of your presentations will you change the next time? Which verbs (verbs) will you use to treat your listeners to active language?

Yours sincerely,

Arno Fischbacher

Read also on this topic: How to avoid sounding like a professional article

Or also: The pressure to speak – and how to avoid it