Make your Presentations more Memorable by Making your Audience Work

Make your Presentations more Memorable by Making your Audience Work

Delivering a memorable speech can seem like a daunting task. It’s hard enough some times just to keep an audience awake. So what can you do to actually get your audience to remember your message?

Harvard Business Review suggests making your audience work. In stead of laying out everything in front of them, make them think.

It requires effort to get information into explicit memory. The more deeply that your audience thinks about the points you make, the more likely they are to remember what you told them later. Paradoxically, if your presentation is too polished, you may reduce the amount of work that your audience has to do to understand what you are telling them, which may inadvertently make the content of your talk less memorable.

This doesn’t mean making a poorly thought out, and delivered speech. But instead to create moments during your presentation that give your audience an opportunity to think for themselves. Here are a few ideas you could use to get your audience thinking:

  • Do a poll
  • Ask Questions
  • Use Scenarios

 

What methods do you use to help make your presentations more memorable?

 

Getting an Audience to Remember Your Presentation | Harvard Business Review