Effective Tips on Engaging Your Audience
The most important part of keeping your audience with you is to focus on your presentation. You need to tell your listeners what your presentation is all about as soon as possible. Stating the presentation goals, your research question, your thesis, whatever it is. Tell listeners what they should expect to learn. Previewing what you will explain, your points, approach and the type of content is a must.
Gearing your content to your listeners’ experience, knowledge and interests are important, as knowing your audience helps you get your point across. Guiding your listeners requires a few preparations:
Use Previews and Summaries
Previews can tell your listeners what you have coming up next, as well as what you’re going to do to develop your point. Use that to your advantage to get your point across clearly and early on.
Use Signposts and Transitions
What are signposts? They are words and phrases that emphasise important points in your speech, such as “In the first place”, “The second point is”, “The key argument is” and so forth. This helps tell your audience the important bits of your speech, flagging them by order of importance and denoting what needs to be remembered. Transitions ensure that no one will be left hanging when you move from one point to another during your speech. They will show how each point connects to the other in your thesis, helping you improve the flow of your presentation. Oral presentations and transitions must sometimes be more obvious when speaking than they are in written form. You should use them to tell your listeners that you’re moving on, but also where you’re going next. Use changes in gestures, body positions and voice to help your listeners in the process.
Use Clear and Precise Language
You should avoid using vague pronoun references. These are already hard enough in writing, but awful in speech. Listeners won’t have the option of looking over the text to figure out what was said, so you need to think ahead.
Words like “respectively” added at the end of a list of people or subjects should be avoided as well. Much like pronouns, both of them require constructions that need the audience to pay attention to remember details, rather than understanding a later reference to those words. The problem with this is that listeners may have not been paying close attention to the earlier details, so they may not realise you’re referring to those at a later time. Whenever you feel tempted to use that kind of word, you should ask yourself whether you will even pay attention to those if you heard them the first time around. Keep it short, on point at all times.
Designing Effective Conclusions
Summarising and refocusing your efforts, in the end, helps a great deal. Recap the main arguments and points you covered in your presence once more, to cement them in your audience’s memories. Reiterate the thesis, research question, the purpose of your whole speech. Reinforcing what’s important to the audience will help your audience take what’s important from the presentation.
Closing the speech should offer a sense of finality. You can use many of the same types of verbal devices used for openings. Returning to the same quote, anecdote or remark you used in the opening of your speech, but with a twist works as well. You can lay a challenge, restate your basic conclusion and recommendation or take a look at the future. Avoid introducing new evidence or opening a new line or an argument, however. That might distract your audience at the very end.
