Did your audience still hear your voice after your presentation?

In her Knockout Presentations Blog on August 8th a post by Diane DiResta titled Can Your Audience Still Hear Your Voice After Your Presentation? posed that provocative question that was asked at the National Speakers Association (NSA) convention.

It was meant figuratively, but it also has a literal answer - just for a second. For music two seconds also is fine. Look up the Wikipedia entry for Wallace Clement Sabine, who found that the aptly named Fogg Lecture Hall at Harvard had an unacceptable reverberation time of five and a half seconds. I’ve posted about room acoustics before. 

Figuratively speaking, it is all too easy to put your audience to sleep with an uninspired presentation. Staying creative, and writing speeches that tell stories isn’t easy.

Pages 14 to 18 of the July/August issue of the NSA’s Speaker magazine had an interview with screenwriting lecturer Robert McKee about The Business of Story.

Also, On August 5th the Convene blog had a post about 5 Ways to Keep Your Best Ideas Flowing.

There was an excellent four page magazine article about how to Reclaim Your Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley that appeared in the December 2012 issue of the Harvard Business Review on pages 115 to 118. You can download a reprint here or here. They discuss overcoming four fears of: the messy unknown, being judged, the first step, and losing control.

Images of David E. Lillienthal and Senators Maloney and Radcliffe both came from the Library of Congress.