As soon as the audience gets your main point, every person can decide individually whether or not they are interested to hear how your message is supported. “But if I say the most important thing first, people might not listen to the end?” Exactly! You never know if people will listen to the end, so therefore, by stating your main message in the beginning, you ensure that people know what you want them to know. Only after that, you present material to support that conclusion, which you summarize at the end before repeating your conclusion. Instead, after briefly introducing your field of research, you should say your conclusion before anything else. Perhaps surprisingly, this is highly ineffective. Many speakers mistakenly believe that attention is a goal as such, and so they try to maintain it for as long as possible by postponing the main message- the one thing people are waiting for- until the end. Most importantly, your presentation is not a soap, so it doesn’t need a cliffhanger. Therefore, instead of focusing on getting attention, focus on maximizing the use of the attention you get. Furthermore, if people get your message without paying attention, that seems like a win–win situation. Sure, in order to understand a message, people will likely need to pay attention, but solely capturing (or stealing) that attention does not reach your goal. Note in particular that attention is not a part of your goal. Your personal goal is to get your message across to those researchers for whom it is relevant. So as a speaker, focus not on what you want, but what the audience wants. If you’re in the audience at a scientific conference, what do you really want? For me, that’s quite simple: understanding the papers that seem relevant to me. If you have to thank people for their attention, you probably didn’t really deserve it anyway. That last part might seem strange: would you want people not paying attention? Of course- because attention was never your goal in the first place. Ensure that people who are not interested don’t have to pay attention.Give people who pay attention what they need: a clear insight in your research.You know what is more polite than thanking the audience? Making sure they get the most out of your talk. In that case, I should- and will- be the one thanking you. If you are effective, you are explaining me in 15 minutes what could possibly take me hours to study by myself. It is your duty as a speaker to minimize my effort of understanding. Well, you’ll never have to thank me if your talk is hard to follow, because I will not listen. “I’m terribly sorry that I was boring, thanks for still listening.” It provides speakers with an excuse to be boring, an excuse to not explain effectively, as the audience does the apparently “hard work” of paying attention while the speaker is messing up his or her slides. This whole act of of fake (or sometimes even real) humility is detrimental to an effective conference ecosystem. And sure, it is possible that you were, but why should they even bother paying attention if you didn’t bother to make your talk interesting and relevant to them? Really, how could you possibly feel better if they had to do a conscious effort to stay attentive? If they had to devote any energy on focusing their attention on you, then you clearly were giving a boring talk. Even if you feel the irresistible urge to thank your audience, never thank them for their attention.
They should be thanking you for doing a great job- provided of course, that you really do the best you can to help them understand.Īh, perceived politeness… It wouldn’t be the first time that it stood in the way of effective communication. You are one of the people the audience paid for to see. Was your talk so bad that people had to do you an actual favor by paying attention? We’ve got this whole thing backwards.
For me, the most symptomatic aspect is the obligatory “thank you for your attention” at the end of a talk.
Speakers often talk for themselves, unwittingly spawning facts that are not directly useful to their audience. Talks at academic conferences seldom feature a high knowledge per minute ratio.
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