Too many audiences are passive. Try to arouse them.

Audiences are often passive. Typically they defer questions until the end of a one hour scientific presentation. By that time the questions have been forgotten, assuming the speaker has left any time.

Why such passivity? The desire to be polite? Fear of asking a question that reveals ignorance? They'd rather be doing their email?

In any event, passivity is a prescription for getting nothing from a talk. People don't learn effectively in a passive mode, especially when dozens of complicated slides are whizzing by. You as a speaker get nothing if there is no audience reaction. It's lose-lose. You might as well pass out your journal article and let them read that.

The solution? The speaker needs to "break the ice." Tell the audience they can ask questions as they occur, rather than wait until the end. Come with a set of questions that you will toss out to the audience. Give one of your friends advanced warning that you're going to call on him/her if nobody responds. Have another friend set the lower bar by asking a very basic question. Once the "ice is broken," there will be a lot more interaction.

Never believe the comment, "good presentation," part 2.

As I wrote in an earlier post, it's too easy to get compliments on a bad talk. People want to be nice. Make sure you have an honest friend in the audience who can give it to you straight.

My addendum is that even the most experienced and skilled presenter can mess it up. A few years ago I was working with a very senior biomedical researcher and we were preparing a presentation that represented a major "ask" from a very wealthy donor. I suggested he "dry run" the presentation. His response was, "I've given hundreds of presentations so I don't need to do that."

Not surprisingly, it was a disaster.

Every presentation poses problems for audience comprehension. The presenter needs to identify those challenges before presenting and think about the language that will best help the audience. This challenge exists no matter how experienced and expert you may be.

Understand the listening challenges facing the audience

Perhaps human beings have been speaking long enough so that natural selection has improved our oral comprehension skills. We probably have not been reading long enough and we certainly have not been listening to PowerPoint presentations long enough to have evolved toward mastery. Audiences are not good at listening to slide presentations and it is up to the speaker to help them.

There are five listening challenges facing the audience:

1. Multi-tasking

2. Information overload

3. Slide transitions

4. iphones

5. Slide fatigue

Multi-tasking: A slide presentation asks the audience to read the slides, listen to the speaker, watch the speaker, and watch the pointer. Unless the speaker can create a synergy among these these modes there is no point in having a slide presentation. A common error is when the speaker creates separate audio and visual narratives. Use the pointer to connect the speaker's words with the particular part of the slide being discussed.

Information Overload: The audience does not know what the next slide will contain. Each slide is a surprise. So it is very easy to overwhelm them with too much information. As a rule, remove anything on the slide that you don't discuss.

Slide Transitions: Slides break up what should be a coherent narrative into micro narratives (individual slides). It is up to the speaker to provide the words that bridge one slide to the next and keep the story coherent.

iphones: The audience doesn't hear everything you say and nowadays they are texting or looking out the window. You need to have device that helps the audience "hop back on" to the talk if they have gotten lost. Think about repeated use of an outline slide with arrows showing which part of the talk is coming up.

Slide Fatigue: Just remember that listening to a slide presentation is a passive activity and people generally don't learn well as passive listeners. This problem is unavoidable, but we can minimize it by having a compelling narrative.