Is a small audience one where the speaker doesn’t need a microphone?

At the LinkedIn Public Speaking Network group there was a thread started on July 1st by Tsufit which asked:

“Do you prefer speaking to a LARGE audience or a small INTIMATE audience? Why?”

But, she didn’t define either large or small. Also, on June 30th there was another by Ian Brownlee which linked to an excellent blog post about Presenting to Small vs Large Audiences. Ian said a small audience was one where the group size was less than 12 people. I think instead that a small audience might be more like a classroom with 32 people. 

Once I heard it claimed that:

“There are two types of people - those who divide things into two categories, and those who don’t.”

I don’t divide things into just two categories. Back in December 2008 I blogged about how Your presentation style should match both your intent and the size of your audience and Audience size determines working distance and thus presentation style.

I had pointed out that for dense seating in a square room you would need nine square feet per person, and could calculate the distance as shown above.

Also, you could list a large series of audience sizes (by powers of two) and the corresponding distances, as is shown above. Some of these have names, but many others do not.