Chapter 30 Interact with the audience during your speech

One of my favorite ways to involve the audience in my presentations is to ask questions and get answers.I like to ask the audience to stand up and repeat a sentence after me, or to raise their hands to answer my questions.Percy Whiting has a book, How to Add Humor to Your Speech and Writing, which provides some valuable advice on audience participation, suggesting asking the audience to vote on something, or inviting them to help solve a problem. "You have to be right about something," said Mr. Whiting. "You know, speech is not the same as reciting. The point of a speech is to get a reaction from the audience—to make the audience a participant in the whole affair." I Love how he describes the audience as "participants in the whole thing".This is the crux of everything discussed in this chapter.If you can get the listener involved, he's your good buddy.