Gain and Sustain Involvement

Audience members are not simply empty vessels into which you can pour facts and figures for automatic processing. Before your listeners retain information, they must be able to recognize, understand, and relate to it.

Use audience analysis to gauge the audience’s existing knowledge of your topic and their likely interests and needs with respect to it (see Chapter 6). Then adjust the amount and complexity of information accordingly. Most people will recall less than half of the information you tell them, so focus on what you most want to convey and trim material that does not strongly support your central idea.²

Audiences seek knowledge; they want to learn something new. To satisfy this drive, try to uncover information that is fresh and compelling. Seek out unusual angles, novel interpretations, moving stories, and striking examples. If a speech does not offer audience members anything new, they will feel that their time has been wasted and will rightly be offended.³

Audience members cannot put the speaker on “pause” in order to digest information, so help them to stay on track:

• Prepare a well-organized introduction that clearly previews main points (see Chapter 15).
• Make liberal use of transition words and phrases (“first,” “next,” “I”ll now turn . . .”) to tie speech ideas together and map the logical flow of ideas.
• Use internal previews to forecast key points and internal summaries to reinforce them.
• Use rhetorical devices such as repetition and parallelism to reinforce information and drive home key ideas.
• Choose an organizational pattern to help listeners mentally organize ideas and see relationships among them.⁴