Holding an Audience
I ’ve been something of a student of speeches and presentations lately. One of the things that really stands out it that if you want to hold an audience, you have to make it clear to the audience that what you have to say is going to help them in some way and you have to do it quickly. At the very least, the audience how to understand that you are giving talking about something that they will be called to use. The same thing can be said of blog posts or pretty much any other form of communication. Take a presentation by Nancy Duarte at TEDx East for example. She walks out on stage and says, “You have the power to change the world.” Now, contrast that with a TED presentation by Deb Roy. He walks out on stage and says, “Imagine if you could record your life.” He then shows a family picture of him and his wife bringing their son home from the hospital and how they recorded their lives and then used those recordings to trace the origins of language, words like water, etc. He even plays ...