Delivery

To make sure that your audience pays attention to what you are saying, you must have an engaging delivery. Your delivery is how you say whatever you are saying.

Spoken delivery and written delivery are different but share a crucial similarity: both are highly dependent on how they begin. To be highly engaging, both spoken and written communication must have excellent first sentences. This sets the tone of your discussion, presentation, document, or email and is crucial to convincing your audience that you will not be boring and are therefore worth their time.

Consider how you might present sales statistics, project status, or user growth projections to an audience. You might start the sales presentation with, "The following presentation will cover our sales numbers for the third quarter."; you might start the project status with, "Today I will be presenting the risk factors affecting our project's delivery date;" you might start the user growth projection with, "We will be exploring the computational algorithms and statistical models used to extrapolate user acquisition, retention, and attrition rates year to date."

All of these openings share three characteristics: they are accurate, professional, and extremely boring. When you open a presentation with a dry, dull, and dreary sentence, you are signaling to your audience that the entire presentation will also be dry, dull, and dreary. After those opening sentences, the audience will begin to disengage, and depending on their attention span, may stop paying attention entirely.

Now, let's rework these opening sentences to make them more engaging. For the sales presentation, we might open with, "Some of you are about to be rich, and some of you are about to be sad;" for the project status, we might open with, "The good news is we can avoid getting fired, the bad news is some of us are going to have to work overtime;" for the user growth projection, we might open with, "We have a flood of new users, but if we keep losing existing users, we'll be out of business in three years."

Each of these reworks improves our opening sentence, but the more engaging you make your opening sentence, the higher the risk that you might confuse or upset your audience. Shock, awe, and surprise can help make an opening more engaging, but in a professional work environment people may not think that your shocking, awe-inspiring, or surprising opening is appropriate. Telling your audience that only some of them will get rich, some will have to work overtime, or that the entire business will fail may grab their attention, but it may also have repercussions for you as the presenter.

To figure out the right balance of professionalism and engagement, a wise strategy is to give your presentation to a small test audience and gauge their reaction.

For example, if you are about to give an important presentation to the entire company, giving your presentation beforehand to a few trusted colleagues who you know will give you honest feedback can help you avoid stepping on any landmines. If your small test audience loves your opening, you are probably in the clear, but if they hate it or have concerns, you will have to make adjustments until your opening is both engaging and appropriate.

Once you have figured out how to give a strong opening to your discussion, presentation, document, or email, you now have to hold your audience's attention, and this is where spoken and written communication begin to diverge. However, they must both adhere to the same general principle: don't be boring.

Spoken communication that is soft, slow, and monotonous; or written communication that is a giant wall of text, is boring. To keep your audience engaged you have to address both of these issues.

When communicating verbally, use different volumes, tempos, inflections, and pacing to keep your audience guessing as to how you will deliver the next bit of information. For example, instead of, "Our project will most likely be delivered on time, on budget, and will absolutely satisfy all of our customers' requirements," you can say the same statement to your audience as, "Our project will most likely be delivered on time, on budget, and will absolutely satisfy all of our customers' requirements."

If this is not how you speak naturally, you can learn this style of speaking by observing and emulating actors and comedians, as they are masters of audience engagement. There are many actors and comedians to choose from, so start with someone who has a style of delivery that you find most engaging, and over time, work to integrate their speaking style into how you speak while you are presenting.

For written communication, the solution to making a wall of words into something people will actually want to read is to increase your use of bullets and bolds to visually break up the text, and to intersperse visual elements that are relevant to whatever you are communicating.

For example, if you are making several points in a paragraph, break them up into bullet points. If a particular word, phrase, or sentence is important, then make it bold to draw attention to it. If some of your information can be represented in a diagram, create a diagram, and place it next to the relevant paragraph. If you can make a point more clearly by adding a photograph, do so.

As most people are not graphic designers, attempting to design an engaging document from scratch may end up as a jumbled mess of text mangled with bullets and bolds, and cluttered with diagrams and photos. Fortunately, you can use document templates that show you where to place your content in order for it to look its best. These types of templates are available for practically every type of content creation software, and it's only a question of choosing the right template for your needs.

Learning how to deliver information in a manner that engages your audience is a critical communication skill. If ever you feel that people are not paying attention to what you are saying or writing, double-check that your delivery is as engaging as possible, as an engaging delivery can be the deciding factor in whether people listen to what you say and read what you write.