strategies to Maintain audience interest 15.4 329
In discussing how to develop attention-catching introductions in Chapter 10,
we itemized several specific techniques for gaining your listeners’ attention. The
following strategies build on those techniques.
Motivate Your Audience to Listen to You
Most audiences will probably not be waiting breathlessly for you to talk to them.
You will need to motivate them to listen to you.
Some situations have built-in motivations for listeners. A teacher can say,
“There will be a test covering my lecture tomorrow. It will count as 50 percent
of your semester grade.” Such threatening methods might not make the teacher
popular, but they certainly will motivate the class to listen. Similarly, a boss
might say, “Your ability to use these sales principles will determine whether you
keep your job.” Your boss’s statement will probably motivate you to learn the
company’s sales principles. However, because you will rarely have the power to
motivate your listeners with such strong-arm tactics, you will need to find more
creative ways to get your audience to listen to you.
Never assume that your listeners will be automatically interested in what
you have to say. Pique their interest with a rhetorical question. Tell them a story.
Tell them how the information you present will be of value to them. As the
British writer G. K. Chesterton once said, “There is no such thing as an uninter-
esting topic; there are only uninterested people.”^11
Tell a Story
Good stories with interesting characters and riveting plots have fascinated
listeners for millennia; the words “Once upon a time” are usually surefire
attention-getters. A good story is inherently interesting. Stories are also
a way of connecting your message to people from a variety of cultural
backgrounds.^12
One author suggests that, of all the stories ever told since the beginning of
time, in all cultures, there are only seven basic plots: overcoming the monster,
rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. Think
of a favorite story and see if you can fit it into one of these categories. Another
theory boils the history of stories down even further. It suggests that there is
really only one basic plot: All stories are about overcoming obstacles to find
“home.” This view does not suggest that all characters literally find their way
home; rather, all stories are about striving to find a place, literal or metaphorical,
that represents “home in some way.”^13
The characteristics of a well-told tale are simple yet powerful. As the How
To box describes, a good story includes conflict, incorporates action, creates sus-
pense, and may also include humor.