Involving Your Audience: Making It Active (Part of the Essence of Public Speaking Series)

Rating:
Summary: Best Starter Book For Trainer/Speakers
Review: The more informed or sophisticated your audience-- the more important the question and answer period. If you are a high level speaker the question and answer period (Q&A) is the make or break phase. If you audiences is boards of directors or highly developed professionals and you are searching for information on Q&A periods, you have a problem. You are stuck with this book until something better comes along. We have every reason to expect Q&A to be extensively covered in public speaking books. In the last few months I have read and reviewed two dozen books on speaking. The reality is in all cases Q&A is rarely mentioned. This book devotes a whole chapter to Q&A. The only book that I have found. Is not the barren coverage of Q&A amazing? While the key to Q&A is knowing the subject and confining the session to the area you want to be accountable for, technical advise from a professional speaker might be worthwhile. The chapter on problem people in the audience is also worth reading.

The rest of the book is disappointing. While this book is a good starting point for the trainer oriented speaker, from cover to cover this book is jam packed full of fluff. The strong tendency to touch upon topics without adding any strong insight is constantly frustrating. I wonder if the editorial process dumbed down the book or is the author really insecure about her ability to teach sophisticated public speaking. Such a passion for dividing people into groups and categories-I wonder why. It seems so degrading to the author. From the title and reviews I was hoping for some bold work on "Involving Your Audience" creatively. Getting the audience physically active in a realistic way gets modest treatment in this book. :(

Questionnaire to send to organization before presentation is interesting. Chapter on visual aids seems shallow, but it is a starting point for the novice and as a tickler file. The section on story telling is a good introduction, but author clearly does not provide enough detail when telling her own stories. Details make stories come alive. It is not the clinical circumstances. Story telling treatment in "Using Stories and Humor by Joanna Slan" is vastly superior.

There is enough coverage on how to warm up your speech and interacting with the audience at the basics level that this book has to be rated as the best book as the starting point for trainer/speakers.