Individual Report

Running head: Draft 1

Draft 4

Draft

Institution:

Student’s name:

Date:

Memo

To: Supervisor

From:

Subject: How to keep the audience attention and interest in speech

Presentation is a very important aspect in communication within the organization; it has to be done in an efficient manner to ensure that what is intended to be said is done in the right way. In enhancing presentation in the organization, there is a need to ensure one has the appropriate skills to maintain the audience attention and interests in speech. In addressing presentation skills as prevailing needs in the organization, this paper presents various recommendations on ways that can be used in enhancing organizational communication channels through effective presentation as summarized in the data table below.

Problem statement: How to keep the audience attention and interest in speech.

Purpose: To determine ways to maintain audience attention and interest in speech in the organization

Figure 1: Data table to represent the problem statement and the goal of the memo.

Audience attention is an important aspect in determining the implementation process of different strategies within the organization. This is because every strategy pass through presentation stage where the project manager presents the plan and proposals to the directors through power point presentations. Presentation is also used by heads of department in explaining the implementation strategies to the members of their department. However, some of the stakeholders misunderstand the projects and strategies from the presentation stage due to loss of focus on the presentation content. This raises the need to address ways to maintain the attention of the audience to reduce chances of such incidents.

There are various ways that can be used in keeping the attention of the audience and interest in speech. One of the ways is talking about something that the audience is interested in which only occurs if the speaker does a research on what the audience is interested in before the presentation. In an organization set up, there are team leaders who focus on topics that are only related to their positions and not their subordinates and expect the employees to maintain attention during the meetings. For instance, a departmental manager may give a speech to the members of department on internal organizational changes that do not affect the employees in that specific department instead of explaining how organizational changes affect the impact of the employees in delivering services to the clients. This might contribute into the audience or the employees listening to lose their interest in the speech and shift their attention to other things other than the speech being given (Sharma, 2018).

Also, use of different changes and styles during the presentation also helps in maintaining attention during the speech. This can be attained through macro-changes such as visual medium through modes such as slides to flipchart. It can also be done through micro-changes such as showing a short video in the middle of the speech and using silence before and after critical statements. This helps in enhancing the concentration of the audience as the anxiety levels are triggered and suspense created through the moments of silence. The speaker can enhance the attention of the audience by ensuring there is a flow throughout the speech. This is attained by ensuring the language is not technical in the speech and at the same time the speech is not too easy for the audience to connect. When the language is too easy, the audience might lose interest in the subject while use of a complex language might cause loss of attention of the audience. In addition to the strategies in maintaining audience attention is ensuring the speech is not too long or having frequent breaks. This reduces chances of loss of attention and interest caused by boredom as illustrated in the graph (Nelson and Lei, 2018).

Image1. The relationship between time and audience attention during a speech.

References

Nelson, J. L., & Lei, R. F. (2018). The effect of digital platforms on news audience behavior. Digital journalism, 6(5), 619-633.

Sharma, D. (2018). Style dominance: Attention, audience, and the ‘real me’. Language in Society, 47(1), 1-31.