English Presentation Phrases: How to Open, Structure, Handle Questions and Close

The five stages of an English presentation

Most presentations, from a five-minute team update to a conference talk, follow the same path. The table gives each stage one phrase you can rely on; the sections below add more.

Spoken English needs more of this structure than writing does. A reader can look back at a heading; a listener only has your voice. Words that would feel repetitive in an email, like “first,” “second” and “to sum up,” help an audience follow you.

Opening: greet, introduce yourself and the topic

Keep the self-introduction to one or two sentences: your name, your role and, if it helps, why you are the one talking about this topic. For longer introductions, at a conference or with a new client, see how to introduce yourself in English.

Getting attention in the first minute

After the greeting, give people a reason to listen. Three simple openers work in most settings:

• A question: “How many of you have waited more than a day for a reply from a supplier?” Wait for a few hands, or answer it yourself.
• A fact: “Right now, a customer request can sit in three different inboxes before anyone answers it.”
• A short story: “Last month, a customer emailed us three times about the same order.”

Don’t open with an apology for your English or for your slides. It points the audience at the problem before you’ve said anything about your topic. If there’s something practical to mention, keep it short: “I’ll share the slides after the meeting, so there’s no need to take notes.”

The roadmap: tell people what’s coming

The roadmap is one or two sentences that list the parts of your talk. It takes a few seconds and gives the audience a map to hold on to.

Say when you’ll take questions. If you prefer them at the end, saying so in the roadmap gives you a polite way to hold off an early one: “Good question. I’ll come back to that at the end, if that’s OK.”

Signposting: phrases for moving from point to point

Signposts are the short phrases that mark where you are in the talk: the start of a point, the end of one, a step back, a side note. Prepare one for every change of slide or section. Fillers can slip in between points, when you are moving on and have nothing ready to say; a prepared transition fills that gap.

Number your points out loud: “first,” “second,” “finally.” Try not to join every section with “and then” or “next.” If you tend to say “um” between slides, our guide to English filler words has a pause drill and phrases that buy thinking time.

Talking about slides, charts and numbers

Pointing to a slide

Don’t read the slide aloud. Tell the audience what to look at and what it means: “The key number here is 40 percent. That’s the share of requests that wait more than a day.”

Describing trends: up, down and flat

Add an adverb to show how much or how fast: sharply, significantly or dramatically for big changes, steadily or gradually for slow ones, slightly for small ones. Save strong verbs like “soar” and “plummet” for changes that really are dramatic, or they stop meaning much.

Numbers and prepositions

Be careful with changes in percentages. If a rate goes from 20 percent to 30 percent, that is a rise of 10 percentage points, and also a rise of 50 percent, because 10 is half of 20. Wiktionary’s entry uses the same example. Say “percentage points” when you mean the difference between two percentages.

Saying numbers out loud

Round numbers when the exact figure doesn’t matter: “about two and a half million” is easier to follow than “two million, four hundred eighty-seven thousand.” Put the exact number on the slide and say the rounded one. If your language groups large numbers differently from English, practice the big ones in advance; the mistakes section below has the details.

Emphasizing and summarizing

Emphasizing a point

You can also emphasize with your voice: slow down, pause before the key point and stress the important word. There’s more on that in the delivery tips below.

Summarizing

Inviting and handling questions

Questions are the part you can’t script, because you don’t know the exact words in advance. You can prepare the moves, though: invite, check the question, answer briefly and check your answer. The phrases below cover each move, including what to say when you don’t know.

Inviting questions

• “I’d be happy to take any questions.”
• “What questions do you have?”
• “Does anyone have any questions?”
• “Let’s open it up for questions.”
• “Are there any questions so far?” (in the middle of the talk)
• “Feel free to unmute or type your question in the chat.” (online)

Checking that you understood

Answering and checking the answer

Answer the question that was asked, briefly, then hand the floor back: “Does that answer your question?” “I hope that helps.” “Does that make sense?” If the full answer would take a while, give the short version and offer more: “The short answer is yes. I’m happy to go through the details after the meeting.”

When you don’t know the answer

“I don’t know” is a fine answer if you add what you’ll do about it. A guess presented as a fact is worse, because people may act on it.

• “I don’t know the exact figure off the top of my head. I’ll check and get back to you by Friday.”
• “I don’t have that data with me, but I can send it to you after the meeting.”
• “That’s outside my area. Ana from finance would be the best person to ask.”
• “I’m not sure, to be honest. Let me find out and email everyone.”

Then follow through: write the question down so you remember who asked it and what you promised.

Difficult questions, interruptions and running out of time

With a hostile question, acknowledge it, answer the part you can and don’t argue in front of the room. A calm “That’s a fair point” costs nothing and gives you a few seconds to think.

Practice Daniel’s lines with the trainer, then switch roles and ask the questions yourself. Notice the four moves: a rephrased question (“So you’re asking…”), an honest “I don’t have the exact figure” with a deadline, a concern acknowledged before it is answered, and a check at the end (“Does that answer your question?”). The test, the numbers and the names are made up for illustration.

Closing and thanking the audience

Plan the close as carefully as the opening: it is the last thing the audience hears from you.

Two orders both work. You can sum up, thank the audience and open the floor. Or you can sum up, take questions and finish with one short line after the last answer, so the talk ends on your message rather than on the last question. Don’t end with only “That’s all” or “OK, that’s it,” which sound abrupt. “That brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you” does the same job.

Formal and semi-formal presentation English

Most workplace presentations, such as team updates, project reviews and demos, are semi-formal. Use the formal column for conferences, senior audiences, clients you don’t know yet and interviews where you present. Contractions such as “I’ll” and “we’re” are fine in both.

“Ladies and gentlemen” still appears at formal events, but “Good morning, everyone” works almost anywhere.

Presenting online: screen sharing, mute and checking that people can see

On a video call, you lose much of the feedback a room gives you: you can’t see puzzled faces, and people find it harder to interrupt. Check in more often, and say out loud what you’re doing on screen.

A few settings help. Zoom and Microsoft Teams both let you share a single window instead of your entire screen (Zoom, Microsoft Teams), so your email and chat stay out of view. If you’ll play a video, turn on Zoom’s “Share sound” or Teams’ “Include sound” when you choose what to share. According to Zoom’s guide to sharing a PowerPoint presentation, with two monitors the presenter view, with your notes, appears on the second screen; with one monitor, you can run the slide show in a window.

For audio trouble and asking people to repeat, our guide to English phone call phrases has more lines that work on video calls too.

A sample opening and closing

Here is a short opening and closing for a ten-minute team update. The company, names and numbers are made up for illustration; swap in your own topic and keep the frame.

Notice what the frame does. The opening names the topic, gives one concrete fact and lists three parts. The closing repeats the main point, makes one request and hands over to questions. Practice both with the read-aloud trainer until you can say them without looking.

Delivery tips for non-native speakers

Pace: steady, a little slower than conversation

Baruch College’s Tools for Clear Speech puts the average English speaker at about 150 words per minute and suggests that, if your pace makes you harder to understand, you aim for about 140 (Speaking Rate). It also notes that speaking too slowly can hurt intelligibility, so aim for steady, not slow. VirtualSpeech lists 100 to 150 words per minute as a comfortable pace for presentations and, from its own data on practice talks, suggests roughly 120 to 160 for most of them (VirtualSpeech).

To time a script before you rehearse, paste it into our speaking rate calculator. At its presentation preset of 130 words per minute, a ten-minute slot holds about 1,300 words. If your script is longer, cut words rather than speaking faster.

Pauses: one idea at a time

Baruch’s page on thought groups and pausing describes organizing speech into groups of words that make up a single idea, with a very short pause between them, and notes that this is especially useful in presentations. In practice, pause after you name a key number, before a transition and after someone asks you a question. A pause in those places sounds deliberate. Our guide to English filler words has a drill for replacing “um” with silence.

Stress the words that matter

In each thought group, one word gets the most stress. Baruch calls it the focus word, and it tends to be the last important word in the group. In a presentation, that is often the number, the change or the contrast: “Response time fell to two hours.” “The problem isn’t the price. It’s the delivery time.” Mark these words in your notes and give them extra weight when you rehearse.

Slides are not your script

Full sentences on a slide make the audience read and listen at the same time. In a study by Richard Mayer, Julie Heiser and Steven Lonn, college students watched a narrated animation; those who also saw on-screen text that summarized or repeated the narration did worse on tests of what they remembered and could apply than students who saw no on-screen text (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2001). That was a short science lesson, not a business talk, and even the summary text hurt. So keep words on the slide to a minimum: show the chart, the key number or a picture, and say the full sentences yourself.

In your notes, write keywords and your transition phrases, not a full script. The exceptions are your first two sentences and your last two: learn those word for word, so you start and finish well even if you’re nervous.

Check the words you’ll repeat

Every talk has a few words you’ll say again and again: a product name, a technical term, a client’s name, the key number. Check how they are pronounced before you rehearse, and practice them inside full sentences, not alone. Our guide to English pronunciation practice has exercises for this.

A rehearsal routine for the week before

Rehearse out loud. Reading your notes silently doesn’t train you to say the words. This routine is our suggestion; adjust it to the time you have.

1. Say the frame out loud. The opening, the roadmap, every transition and the close, until you can say them without notes.
2. Run the whole talk with a timer and record it. Your phone is enough. If you run over, cut content instead of speeding up.
3. Listen back once. Check three things: your pace, whether you pause at the transitions and whether you stress the key numbers. Count your “um”s if they bother you.
4. Write down the questions you expect. Include one you can’t fully answer and one from someone who disagrees. Answer each out loud in 30 to 60 seconds.
5. Rehearse the Q&A as a role-play. Ask a colleague to play a skeptical manager or client and to ask the questions in a different order from your list. If nobody is free, an AI tutor can play the role (see below).
6. Do a final run the day before. Stand up and use the real slides. For an online talk, share your screen in a test call.

The Q&A deserves its own rehearsal because it is the part you can’t script. Once you have answered “What would it cost?” out loud a few times, the real meeting is no longer the first time you hear it.

Common mistakes and what to say instead

Mistakes in any language

• Apologizing for your English. “Sorry for my bad English” puts the audience’s attention on your English instead of your topic. Start with the greeting.
• “Explain about” and “discuss about.” Both verbs take a direct object: “I’ll explain the results,” “We’ll discuss the budget.” Wiktionary labels the main senses of both explain and discuss transitive. “About” goes with “talk”: “I’ll talk about the results.”
• “Explain you.” Say “explain the plan to you” or “walk you through the plan.”
• “Thank you for your listening.” Say “Thank you for listening” or “Thank you for your attention.”
• “Any question?” Make it plural: “Any questions?” or “What questions do you have?”
• Ending with “That’s all.” On its own it sounds abrupt. Try “That brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you.”

Mistakes by first language

If you speak Japanese or Korean

If you’re used to ending a talk with 以上です or 이상입니다, don’t translate it as “That’s all,” which sounds abrupt in English; “That brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you” does the same job. Big numbers need practice too. Japanese and Korean count in units of ten thousand (万, 만) and a hundred million (億, 억), while English counts in thousands and millions. So 3万 or 3만 is “thirty thousand,” 50万 or 50만 is “five hundred thousand” and 1億 or 1억 is “one hundred million.” Write the English version of every big number in your notes.

If you speak Spanish or Portuguese

In standard Spanish, un billón is a million million, an English “trillion,” and the English “billion” is mil millones (Wiktionary). Brazilian Portuguese bilhão already matches the English “billion” (Wiktionary). Brazil, Spain, Argentina, Colombia and Chile write decimals with a comma; English uses a point and says it out loud, so 3,5% becomes “three point five percent” (Wikipedia).

Watch the false friends that show up in presentations. Spanish actualmente and Portuguese atualmente mean “currently,” not “actually.” In asistir a una reunión or assistir a uma palestra, the verb means “attend” (in Portuguese also “watch”), so it’s “thank you for attending,” not “for assisting.” Portuguese atender is “answer” (the phone) or “serve” (a client), not “attend.” And in pretendemos lanzar en mayo or pretendemos lançar em maio, pretender means “intend”: “we intend to launch in May,” not “we pretend to.” Wiktionary lists these senses for actualmente, atualmente, asistir, assistir, atender and pretender.

Rehearse your Q&A with an AI tutor

Questions are hard to rehearse alone, because someone has to ask them. In Fluently, you talk with an AI tutor by voice, like on a phone call. You can describe your own scenario for a role-play, and the tutor plays the other role. For example: “You’re my manager. I’ve just presented a plan to move our support team to one shared inbox. Ask me tough questions, one at a time.” Then you answer in real time, without a script.

After your turn, a card can show a grammar fix, a more natural way to say your sentence (the way a native speaker would put it) or a better word, and the conversation keeps going. Your scores for pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, grammar and coherence update as you practice. In the settings, you can turn off live captions, so you catch each question by ear as you would in a real room, and change the tutor’s speaking pace: start slower, then move to normal speed before the real thing.

To see where you stand first, the free English speaking test in the app is a conversation of about four minutes that estimates your CEFR level and gives you an overall score out of 100 and scores for five skills.

Fluently is free to start. Take a free AI speaking assessment to see your level, then practice with games that build your vocabulary and pronunciation. Conversations with your AI tutor come with Fluently Premium.

Rehearse the questions before the real ones

Get the Fluently app and take the free AI speaking assessment to see your level, then practice with games that build your vocabulary and pronunciation. Conversations with your AI tutor, where you can role-play the Q&A after your talk and get cards after your turn, come with Fluently Premium.

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