Questions in general are powerful tools for speakers.
They bring focus to key points we want to get across.
They are particularly useful in getting our audience engaged.
They also have a danger within them. Knowing when to use questions and what types of questions to use, are things which must be worked out in the planning of the presentation and shouldn't be done on the fly. If you want to get yourself into trouble, then ask the wrong question, at the wrong time, and then brace yourself for the reaction.
Actually audience concentration spans are a nightmare today. They have become so short and everyone has become addicted to multitasking.
Even if they are enjoying the presentation, they are scrolling through their screens right in front of you anyway, without any hint of shame.
This is the new normal. We'll face this problem forever, and we are never going back to the good old days of people politely listening to us right through our presentations.
This is why we need to be switching up the presentation every five minutes or so to keep the audience intrigued with what we are presenting.
This is where great information or insights really help. The audience access to something new or valuable will pry them from their screens for a few minutes longer. We will need to be able to be using the full range of our vocal delivery skills to keep them with us.
Questions are an additional assist to break through the competing focus for audience attention.
By simply asking a well constructed question, we can grab audience attention. When we lob in a question, we magically get all eyes back on us. We've now gotten the audience thinking about the point we have raised.
Rhetorical questions are particularly handy.
They give us the ability to capture the mental attention of our audience on the topic we are discussing, get them engaged, and we can maintain the control.
The key point here is to design the questions into the talk at the start.
In those five minute blocks, we need to have little attractions to keep interest.
They might be powerful visuals, great storytelling, vocal range for effect, or rhetorical questions.
The key is to have variety planned from the start. In a forty minute speech, apart from the opening and the closings, there are going to be five or six chances to grab attention. At the start, we can use vocal range and visuals, but as we get into the middle and toward the end, we need to bring up the bigger guns as people start to fade out.
Sprinkling a couple of well constructed rhetorical questions into our presentation will help us to maintain interest, and defeat our screen based social media and internet competition.
Get used to this, because this is the future for all of us. As presenters, and we have to lift our game to make sure we are in a position to have a powerful influence with our audiences.
The alternative is Speaker Oblivion.
