Roland Millward

When you give a talk you need to make sure that it will make sense to your audience.

It is possible to give a talk that is hard for our audience to understand or follow along with our reasoning because of the way we explain things. Here are a few tips that will help you to make sure that your talk is easy to follow and understand.

Know your audience

The first consideration always has to be your audience. Ask yourself what is their level of understanding of your subject? Are you speaking as an expert to colleagues that have a good level of knowledge or to lay people that would know very little? Once you have determined this you will need to use terms that will be understandable or at least explained so that they can be understood.

Bridge Ideas

When you give a talk it will be made up of a number of ideas and to keep your audience following along you need to make sure that they are able to see how they all fit together? To make sure that your audience follow along you need to use transitional expressions that link the ideas together. Simple transitional phrases are: also, in addition, furthermore, likewise and similarly. There are many such simple expressions and I am sure you get the idea. However with some transitions much more is called for and an explanation of the link may take several sentences. You need to take care to see how much explanation is required to link one idea to another. You need to try and see it from your audience’s viewpoint and not from your own knowledgeable understanding.

Reasonable Order

You need to deliver your talk in a logical and reasonable order. Your line of argument or explanation needs to be progressive so that your audience can build on what you saying ready to understand the next part of your talk. If you try and do step 4 before step 3 your audience will be lost and may not be able to pick up the thread later. No builder would try and put the roof on a house before he had built the foundations and walls so don’t try and do something similar in your talk.

Stay Focused

It is very important that you do not allow yourself to drift off course from your theme as this can lead the minds of your listeners along a different route. They will spend time trying to make sense of how this fits in with your talk and will become confused even when you get back on the right track. Therefore for example, don’t be tempted to tell interesting stories unless they relate to your theme and help your audience to make sense of your talk. Only choose material for your talk that will help your audience and leave out anything that is irrelevant. On the other hand make sure that you don’t leave out anything that is essential to the talk being understood.

Making a talk make sense is taught in our one day intensive public speaking course.

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Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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