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You are here: Home / Delivery / Get your audience’s attention by adding anticipation

Get your audience’s attention by adding anticipation

September 27, 2010 by Ellen Finkelstein 2 Comments

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A presentation that communicates well uses a slide to help the audience understand and remember your point. If you use the Tell ‘n’ ShowSM Method, you can do this easily.

But, when your topic is a little boring, like a review of 3rd quarter sales, you may need a little help to keep the attention of your audience. Usually, interaction with the audience (asking them a question, for example) will not be appropriate. (It seems silly to ask them to guess what the numbers were.)

Instead, you can get your audience’s attention by adding a little anticipation. So, instead of a slide like this

powerpoint_tips_get_attention_with_anticipation-2

You could start with a slide like this

powerpoint_tips_get_attention_with_anticipation-3

Don’t you think that will get their attention? It’ll probably get a laugh, too. This delivery technique requires you to ungroup the graph and animate its pieces to appear as you explain. Finally, you’ll reveal the secret, the increase in 3rd quarter sales.

Here’s a video that shows how you could explain this slide. By keeping the number unknown until near the end of the explanation, you ensure that people will listen!

To bring in a chart piece by piece, you can use PowerPoint’s standard animation, but it may not give you the options you want. Instead, you can ungroup the chart and manually add the animation you need. This is a bit of a chore and you lose the connection between the chart and the data (if any). In PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, you can’t actually ungroup a chart, so you need to use a workaround. For more information, see the tip below.

Related tips

Animate a chart or table

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Related posts:

  1. Keep your audience riveted by adding anticipation to storytelling
  2. Animate a chart or table
  3. How to keep your audience’s attention
  4. Create a lightbox or mask effect in PowerPoint to focus attention

Filed Under: Delivery Tagged With: anticipation, attention

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Marco MontemagnoJessica Pyne Recent comment authors
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Jessica Pyne
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Jessica Pyne

Hi Ellen,

This is a great principle of effective presenting, and something we use frequently in our slides – although we call it Visual Cognitive Dissonance. We explain it briefly here: http://www.m62.net/presentation-theory/visualisation/slides-that-dont-make-sense/

Your point about animating slides to build is particularly relevant. In fact, all graphs should be animated so that they appear in stages – it helps the audience to assimilate information, and to focus on what is most important at the relevant time!

Thanks for a good post.

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12 years ago
Marco Montemagno
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Marco Montemagno

Even if I’m not a fan for slides I liked your point.
Hi and congrats for your videos!

At http://www.presenterimpossible.com I’ve just started sharing tips and advices for all the people interested in delivering presentations and I just wrote “9 tips to get your audience’s attention in 10 seconds” that maybe can be an additional help for your readers 🙂

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11 years ago
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