Increase your spoken and written "Word Power"!

1. Inflection creates meaning when speaking words. Try saying this sentence out loud several times, inflecting a different word each time to get a differing meaning. "I am not driving home after lunch." Were you able to derive different possible meanings depending on which word you emphasized? It's not just what word we say, but how we say it!

2. Take a speech or presentation you commonly give, and pretend it is now to be given to a very different audience. After deciding on the interests, background knowledge, and demographics of the fictional audience, look at your speech and change the words you commonly use to better address the new audience. For instance if you give a speech about donating money to a worthy cause and you are talking to college kids, what words, examples and references might be different if your audience is made up of retirees?