As public speakers, we take our audience on a journey, and we need to show them the way. Remember the old maxim, "First, I tell them what I'm going to tell them, then, I tell them and lastly, I remind them what I've told them". This rule is particularly important to keep in mind when our speech is going to include a great deal of information.
When there is a lot of information to cover in our speech, we have to make sure that we go through each point clearly because listening is a passive skill, unlike reading which is active. Thus, when it comes to listening, many people have poorer concentration. Most people listen for about ten minutes and then their mind and attention wander. They begin to think of other things. Because of that, we need to find ways to revive them and make them stay with us throughout the speech.
In order to get back their attention, we can firstly use visual aids. We should include pictures, graphs, mind maps or flowcharts to accompany the point that we make. This is due to the reason that when the listeners can see something while listening, they can concentrate better. Secondly, we can include humour or jokes. Plan the use of humour so that it comes at intervals throughout the speech. Do not joke all the way throughout our speech! If this is what we do, nobody takes us and the information in our speech seriously.
The next point is to surprise our audience with a direct question. It can be as simple as, "Do you agree?". They will surely wake up! And they will try to concentrate on what we are saying in case we ask them again. Then, another way is to ask for a show of hands, in other words, ask them to put up their hands to the question that we ask, for example, "How many of you have a tv screen in your car?". When they raise their hands, they are physically involved and this makes them feel less sleepy.
Besides that, in order to ensure that they can follow our points; use signal words like firstly, secondly, then, finally and others to show sequence. And the last method is to get the listeners to write things down. For instance, ask them to turn to their neighbours and make a list of all the tv programmes that he/she likes. Then, you can even choose a few of them to share it with everybody.
These are just some of the ways that we can adopt to make our speech more interesting and easier to follow. If we manage to apply these methods in our speech, our listeners will stay awake and be able to understand our speech more easily.
List down four of the ways that are used to revive and make the audience stay with us throughout our speech.
