In the wonderful book “Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story
1. Start with a Question
For this opening to be effective you have to direct the question to the audience. A question that’s well formulated, helps your audience to get involved and to think more about the things you’ll be sharing with them.
2. Start with Interesting Facts
Start with some striking fact or statistic about the main theme of your presentation. For instance, if you’re talking about training dogs, you could say the number of trained dogs in a year in your city.
3. Put your main theme in Perspective
State something that helps your audience think about the theme you’re presenting in restrospective or prospective. Help your audience to have a sense of how it was then, and how it is not now.
4. Open with an Anecdote
There are times when an anecdote is the proper way to open a presentation. This opening has to be used when you want to create an empathy bond between you and your audience. Anecdotes are short human interests stories.
5. Use a Famous Quote
A proper quote from a respected source is always a good opening for a presentation. Nevertheless, it should be relevant to the subject of your presentation.
Start with any of these openings or a combination of them, and you will certainly get the audience’s attention, and with it the opportunity to give an effective presentation. The key is that your opening has to be related to the main goal of your presentation or the whole subject you’ll be talking about.
3 comments
I reckon there should be answer at the end of presentation to the given question, it can be explicit or implicit. Here one interesting thing is different outcome/different recognizing the question. Nevertheless, the most important goal is you have already taken your audience under your attention/pressure.
Throwing Questions to your audience and giving answers creat an awareness
Throwing Questions to your Audience gives you a Good opening in Public Speaking
I HAVE REALLY OBSERVED THAT IT IS IMPORTANT TO GET YOUR AUDIENCE AN IMMEDIATE ATTENTION BEFORE YOUR SPEECH
I have observed that you speak to your audience well without fear if you attend earlier with full confidence at meetings you have been an assignment to give a speech
There is nothing interesting than capturing an understanding audience. This satisfying moments creates confidence in the speaker. Thanks for your notes.
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