Get to the Point!

7Strengthen Your Point

You’ve now identified your point, learned how to convey it and stick to it, and realized the imperative of selling it versus sharing it. That knowledge alone puts you way ahead of your competitors and colleagues.

Now it’s time for extra credit: strengthening your point through key presentational understandings and techniques.

Power Periods

Many people—people you know, people you report to, even people you admire—end their declarations as if they’re questions, using a higher pitch at the end, even though no question was posed. It’s often called uptalk or upspeak.

Listen for it by saying these two sentences aloud, with particular attention to the punctuation:

“Our customer base has tripled in size?”

“Our customer base has ...