Total Body Singing
Total body movement should become an unconscious habit of your singing. Becoming more animated as you sing will help you "sell" the audience on songs' messages by becoming more emotionally involved in those messages. Lean forward on the balls of your feet during sections that grow in volume and/or intensity. Reset your body (lean away from and then back in toward the audience slightly with a head nod) during key transitions. And of course, put emotion on your face! If your face doesn't look like you're feeling the emotion of the song, the other body movements won't help very much. And remember, always do something! Even if you're not singing at the moment, you don't want the audience to be able to tell by simply looking at your facial expressions.
 
Consistent Focus
A good focus will help rehearsals stay on schedule. If you feel you must say something, wait until we take a break and then talk. If you are not clear on something, can it wait until we take a break? Often, you'll find that your question will be answered soon anyway, as the session progresses. A consistent focus helps enable us to be productive and make progress each week, instead of rehashing the same problems during every practice.
 
Proper Stance
A good stance will facilitate good singing and performing. Feet and arms should hang loosely at your side. Most of your weight should be thrust forward, so that you're balancing on the balls of your feet. If you're on a riser, stand at the front of your riser. If you're in the front row, you should stand twelve inches away from the front riser. The outside foot (the one away from the director) should be slightly more forward than the inside foot, so that you're angled in toward the director. Last, but not least, you should stand straight with your shoulders up as if you raised your arms and then (without moving your shoulders) let them fall to your sides. This places your lungs and ribcage in the optimal position for breathing while singing.
 
Proper Breathing
Any singer who develops good breathing skills will consistently produce a better sound. We must learn what muscles are used and then develop them. It's all about muscles, mostly stomach muscles. Expand the stomach, sides and back; your ribcage should expand out, not up (see "Proper Stance"). Relax your neck and shoulders so you can take in large amounts of air without a loud rush (take in air by expanding your stomach and chest muscles, not by breathing as you normally do). The more you practice proper breathing, the more you will develop those stomach and intercostal muscles (the muscles between your ribs). One technique that's used often in chorus singing is "stealth breathing". When is the worst time during a song to run out of air? At the end of a phrase! Stealth breathing prevents you from running out of air at the crucial times when you need to be stronger than ever. Instead of breathing in between words (especially at the obvious places), breathe in place of words, especially words that are in the middle of phrases. If you leave out a word as you sing, breathing instead, while still mouthing the word, no one will be able to tell that you took a breath. Also try to take your stealth breath at a different time from the other singers in your voice part. By staggering your stealth breaths, it will appear that no one breathed throughout the entire song!
 
Exaggerated Pronunciation
An expression that has often been used to achieve the desired pronunciations is to "chew your words" by emphasising consonants (especially "linked" consonants) and diphthongs (syllables containing more than one vowel sound, such as "I", or "ahh-ee"). A deliberate and distended connection between words seems to create a more desirable effect than cutting off the word (and sound) abruptly at the end of each word in a disjointed, mechanical fashion. It helps to exaggerate word pronunciations by linking sounds together in order to reduce or eliminate "white space" between words. Here's an example using the alphabet. The following phrase: "Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z" would be phonetically pronounced "cue, ah, rehhh, stee, you, vee, doubleyou, ehhh, xwah, yand, zee." Note that certain letters have preparatory sounds such as "R, S, T" which really becomes "ah, rehhh, stee" such that the end of a letter sound is linked to the beginning of the next letter sound. Similarly, "X, Y, and" becomes "ehhh, xwah, yand" such that letter sounds are merged or linked together making a very smooth transition between sounds.
 
The word and sound linkages in the tag "I Will Give My Love" can be broken down to demonstrate how the words should be linked based on each note in the song. Each note has a phonetic vowel target sound that is enunciated and linked to the next sound in a smooth transition throughout the tag. For example,

 I     w-il- l    gi- ve  m-  y    l- o- ve  to   y-  ou,  o- n-l-y  y- ou
ah-ee-oo | ih-l | gih-v-m | ah-ee-l | uh-v | too-ee | oo | oh-n-l | ee | oo.

The vertical divider "|" represents the separation of musical notes, not words. This can be seen in that several words such as "will," "love," "my," and, " you" are already beginning to be formed by the singer's mouth before he gets to the note where the word is actually written on the musical score. Again, the linkages can be seen in preparatory vowel sounds such as "oo" just before you begin to pronounce a "w" as in "oo-will" or "oo-ih-l." Also, note how the "m" in "my" is tacked on to the end of "give" to link it together, almost as if the whole song is just one long, distended word.