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Incorporating visual support for your ideas will enhance your speech. These aids not only help you keep your audience’s attention but also help your audience understand complex points. But not just any image or slide will do. Selecting the right visuals and rehearsing with them is key to improving your delivery.

Adding visuals or media (graphs, charts, physical objects, videos, and photographs) to your speech can make it more interesting for your listeners. For example, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor captivates her audiences when she brings out an actual human brain, with an attached spinal cord, in her presentations about the brain’s remarkable capability to recover from certain injuries. But this display is no gimmick. Instead, Dr. Taylor uses this physical object to illustrate part of her powerful story about recovering from a massive stroke at the age of 37 (Taylor, 2008). In your own speeches, you’ll also want to use presentation aids—tools used to display the visuals you’ve selected to help explain or illustrate your points.