The objective for most business presentations to is educate and influence people, while at the same time providing some entertainment to keep them interested. To achieve this, the audience must understand what you are saying. There are three aspects to understanding what someone is saying:

The standard percentages that are often quoted in relation to public speaking, are that 7% of the information is conveyed verbally, 38% vocally, and 55% visually. These percentages have become an urban myth, propagated by presentation trainers and voice coaches around the world.

These percentages are not only misleading, they are wrong. The origins of these figures are two separate studies, one conducted by Albert Mehrabian and Susan Ferris (1967) which compared vocal tone to facial cues, and the other by Mehrabian and Wiener (1967) which compared vocal tones to single words. The single word used was