How To Hold An Audience Attention

Hello. My name is Michael Ronayne. I'm a director of the College of Public Speaking, and I'm going to be talking about different aspects of public speaking.

If you're trying to hold an audience's attention, I think probably the best advice is to be natural, is to be yourself. I've seen many people try various gizmos and tricks to sort of like, you know, bully an audience into paying attention. It doesn't usually work, or if it does, you sort of resent the process at the same time.

Holding an audience's attention, what you need to be able to do is to create images for them that they can latch onto. So you need to be good at telling stories, telling anecdotes, giving examples of things. But also you need to make sure that what you're talking about is relevant to that particular audience.

I remember working with a young man a little while ago, and he wanted to deliver a speech on his hobby, and his hobby was playing basketball. It was fine, perfectly decent speech, but it came across a little bit like, "I play basketball, this is what I do, this I think is fun," and it didn't relate at all to any of the people in the audience. All we needed to do, and all we did in the end, was just change the opening a little bit so that when he started speaking to the audience, he said, "I think it's really important to have a hobby.

I'm sure we've all got hobbies. Maybe you like playing football; maybe you like music; maybe you like dancing. Me? I love basketball.

" So when he started talking about basketball, everybody in the audience was able to listen to him and relate his excitement and his enthusiasm to basketball to their own personal hobby that they like doing. So you need to create this connection with people. And Aristotle, many, many years ago, when he wrote all his books and made all his observations about rhetoric, was well aware.

He pointed out that we need to like the speaker. You know? In a law court, maybe it's all about facts, but most of the time, when a speaker gets up to speak, we need to like them. And the best way to like them and the best way for them to hold our attention, is to be open, is to be honest, is tell us stories.

We're all children. We love hearing stories. But to make sure that what they're telling us is told with us, the audience in mind, and not just for their own point of view. .