Show Your Audience What’s in It for Them
Printed Page 290
Once you have revealed your thesis, you need to generate audience interest and motivate active listening. Our former colleague Dr. Gail Sorenson referred to this as WIIFM (“whiff-em”), or “What’s in it for me?” Through WIIFM, you clarify why your message is relevant to and important for your listeners.
To accomplish this goal, provide one sentence or a short paragraph that indicates why the audience should take an interest in your topic. Avoid going on and on; instead, give listeners just enough to whet their appetite. In the body of your speech, you’ll go into more detail about how the ideas or suggestions in your presentation will benefit listeners.
Following are some examples of effective WIIFM statements:
- Drunk driving is not just a problem on somebody else’s campus. According to the campus police chief, driving-while-intoxicated arrests at this school have soared by 45 percent over the past decade. And that threatens us all.
- I doubt that many of you have lost sleep over the state budget deficit. It did not make my “Top Ten Worries” list, either. But when I found out that our tuition had increased by 27 percent this year as one means of making up the shortfall, I started to worry. And you should, too.
- Today we will consider the history of the 1846 war between the United States and Mexico from a Mexican perspective. This will provide an alternative to the romanticized version many of you were taught in your high school history class.
- My survey showed that 77 percent of this class believes they are spending too much time on school and work at the expense of their social lives. So, instead of focusing on academics today, let’s take a brief look at the art of asking someone out on a date.
