When you’re speaking, especially if you’re working from notes or a script, be careful not to emphasize pronouns.
Why?
Take the following sentence as an example. “Her influence is one reason I’ve been able to drive success.”
If you pop the pronouns, it looks like this: “Her influence is one reason I’ve been able to drive success.”
There are two reasons to avoid this. One is that when we emphasize a pronoun, it often indicates that we are comparing one thing and another. Are we implying that it was “her” influence rather than someone else’s? Or that “I’ve” been successful rather than “you”? Probably not, in this case.
The second reason is that other words in the sentence are more important, and they can do more work for you. Those words are generally nouns and verbs. In this case, I suggest the following: “Her influence is one reason I’ve been able to drive success.”
Don’t let those sneaky pronouns take over!
