Everyone knows about the atrocious speech pathology called Uptalk, but there’s another speech pattern that sounds much like uptalk and can be a more insidious bad presentation habit.

Let’s call it List-Talk.

Both pathologies must be fixed to lift your presentation skill to a professional level.

Here’s the difference between the two pathologies, both of which can sabotage your presentation.

No Need for Self-Sabotage

First, Uptalk.

Uptalk is the bad speech habit of inflecting the voice up at the end of each sentence, as if each sentence were a question.

Uptalk is usually a 24-7 transgression.  If you do it . .  you do it all the time.

Uptalk is breezy, addle-pated, and weak.  With uptalk, you sound air-headed, uncertain, ditzy.  Whiny and pleading.  Someone who doesn’t care.

You could fix uptalk easily, if you wanted to.

But at this point, if you’re still doing it, you probably don’t want to fix it.

Now look at a parallel speech pattern that sounds similar to uptalk.  This pattern appears only on special occasions.

List-Talk only shows up when it can hurt you.

Break this Bad Presentation Habit  Now

What is List-Talk?

You engage in List-Talk only when you deliver your business presentation.

Exactly when it does you the most damage.

List-Speak is the lilting presentation voice we sometimes assume when we give a presentation.  It’s a form of “presentation voice.”  Presentation Voice is an artifice some people unconsciously adopt when speaking to a group in a formal situation.

Especially when we’re attuned to reading slides instead of simply telling our story.

List-Talk creeps in.  It replaces direct, declarative sentences.

List-Talk offers the lilting upswing of the voice at the end of sentences.

As if you’re reading from a mental list.

Each sentence needlessly telegraphs that there’s more to come, that you’ve not yet completed a thought.

Again.  And again.

And this goes on endlessly, until you finish the last point from your slide.  Only then do you mercifully let your voice drop in completion . . .

. . . only to have it go up again as the next slide materializes.

This pathology is linked to your slide.  But it’s not the slide’s fault.

It’s not the fault of PowerPoint.

It’s your fault.

It’s 100 percent your fault.

Fix List-Talk Now

Is anything wrong with List-Talk?

No, not unless your audience enjoys the experience of listening to someone obviously not in possession of the facts . . . because this is the impression given.

What causes it?

Nothing more than tendency to read from your slides.  This is a bad presentation habit heinous in its own right, but more than that, when you read from your slides, your voice goes into List-Talk mode.

You inflect UP at the end of every POINT.  You move from BULLET POINT to BULLET POINT.  The slide itself drags you ALONG.

This lilting presentation voice takes HOLD OF YOU, and you aren’t even aware of what you’re DOING.

Unharness yourself from the visual behind you, and free yourself to speak in declarative sentences.

Drop your voice at the end of each declarative sentence.

Speak with finality as you complete the thought.  As a hammer clanking down upon an anvil.

With confidence and presence.  Just as you do in routine conversation.

Your daily conversations, after all, don’t consist of lists.  Your sentences don’t consist of stating facts and opinions as if numbered on a list.

Break the bad presentation habit of List-Talk right now.

And consult the Complete Guide to Business Presentations for more wisdom on delivering especially powerful business presentations.