7 ways to keep audience attention during your presentation

Keeping audience attention is more important and more difficult than grabbing audience attention. A reader emailed me:

“What can I do to keep the audience’s attention through the whole of my presentation. There are always people who don’t seem to be listening.”

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When can you break the “rule” of a three-part structure?

In my Presentation Planning Guide I suggest that you use a thee-part structure for your presentation. They work for novels and movies, and for presentations too.

But, using a three-part structure is not a rule set in concrete. Sometimes your presentation will be more effective with more points. There’s a risk though, that each time you add a point, you dilute the power of the points that came before. Hence the saying “more is less”.

So you need to be clear that more than three points really are necessary. Here’s the distinction to make:  is each point part of a logical sequence? Or can each point can stand alone? [Read more]

Three levels of presentation openings – which should you use?

I get frustrated at presentation advice which says you have to do something clever or dramatic at the beginning of a presentation to grab your audience’s attention. That’s for three reasons:

1. You don’t have to grab the audience’s attention at the start. You have their attention at the start. The challenge is to keep it. (I’ve written about this a lot – see these posts on this blog The Attention-Getting Myth and Attention-Getting The Evidence and also a discussion between myself and Rowan Manahan on his blog).

2. It’s hard to pull off a dramatic opening when you’re nervous. And most people are most nervous at the beginning of a presentation.

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New research: warning about story-telling

The guru of multimedia learning Richard Mayer has just published a new paper that all presenters should take note of. The paper is called “Increased interestingness of extraneous details in a multimedia science presentation leads to decreased learning”.

The research

Students received one of two PowerPoint presentations about how a cold virus infects the human body.

Both PowerPoint presentations included interesting but irrelevant details about viruses. In the first presentation the details were of high-interest eg: the role of viruses in sex and death. In the second presentation the details were of low-interest eg: health tips about viruses. [Read more]

How to tell a story like Malcolm Gladwell

I bought Outliers two days ago. And though I’m familiar with many of the stories that Gladwell tells I’m still entranced. They work on the printed page and they’ll also work for you in a presentation. How does he do it?

Here’s my analysis of Gladwell’s storytelling techniques -  illustrated by Chapter Five of the book.

1. He starts with one subject

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Six lessons in public speaking from Obama

America has elected the greatest political speaker for a generation.

You may think that there’s nothing for you to learn from Barack Obama’s speechmaking skills – that speaking to 200,000 people at Grant Park, Chicago is too far removed from the presentation you might give to your staff, to your management team or to potential clients. Here are six lessons you can learn from Obama’s acceptance speech at Grant Park.

1. Know your audience

It would have been easy for Obama to fall into the trap of talking to the 200,000 people before him in Grant Park. He didn’t. He spoke to Americans in their living rooms, he spoke to those who voted for McCain, he spoke to people watching him across the world – leaders and the poorest of the  poor. He knew who his audience was. [Read more]

How to say nothing in your next presentation

Have you sometimes gone along to a presentation -it may be entertaining and enjoyable – but at the end of it, or a few days later, you think to yourself – what did I get out of that presentation? It’s easy to fall into the trap, as a presenter, of saying nothing in a presentation.

What are some of the traps:

1. Stating the obvious

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6 Major Distractions to Eliminate in your Presentation #2

Yesterday I talked about 4 environmental distractions which cause people to stop focusing on your presentation.

But it’s also easy to distract your audience by what you say (or don’t say) and by what you show on your PowerPoint slides.

5. What you say (and don’t say)

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Are our brains wired to enjoy stories?

Presentation experts extol the power of telling stories in presentations. A recent Scientific American “The Secrets of Storytelling” explores why stories are so powerful. It looks at three theories from the fascinating field of evolutionary psychology.

Stories are simulations for real life

Keith Oatley, is a professor of applied cognitive psychology and a novelist. So he’s got a special interest in the psychology of fiction. He describes stories as “simulations that run on minds”. He says that just as pilots-in-training spend time on flight simulators, stories may act as flight simulators for real life.

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The power of anecdotal evidence

In your business presentations, you may be tempted to stick to hard, proven facts and statistics to persuade your audience. But a powerful anecdote can trump objective facts.

The power of the anecdote

1. Vaccinations and autism

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