Sunday, March 18, 2012
Attention Getter
The attention getter is a very important part of the speech. It is the audiences very first glimpse into the speech you will be giving and is a great factor on whether or not the audience will pay good attention to the rest of your speech. The attention getter can grab the attention of the audience by being a surprising fact or statistic, or can even be the beginning of a story that you will finish with the conclusion of the speech. It can also help relate you to the audience by being a joke or showing that you selected an appropriate attention getter that relates to them. Showing your awareness of the relation to the audience can be as simple as stating why the topic is important to them. The attention getter can even help eliminate the speaker's nervousness by giving them a good starting point. It can also provide coherence in your speech by providing a theme that the rest of the speech will follow. With how important the attention getter is, I plan on using a statistict or even a story to hopefully grab my audiences attention throughout my speech.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I like what you said about the attention getter helping to eliminate the speakers nervousness. I completely agree with you on this. As a speaker, you can read your audience's response to that first part of your speech. When it is received well, a little bit of that pressure is alleviated. I plan on using a visual aid and asking a question at the beginning of my speech. I also like the idea of telling the beginning of a story in the introduction and the end of the story in the conclusion. This has the same book-end feel that I got from the introduction and conclusion about digital cameras from our Interactive Videos.
ReplyDeleteI so agree with the both of you. When you notice that the audience is welcoming your thoughts and words it takes a huge amount of pressure off of your shoulders. I notice this always makes me relax. I have noticed that everyone also gets nervous with the timing cards. I missed the last speech and had to make it up in another class of Carol's. The timer sat in the back of the class and I noticed it was not as distracting to me. It wasn't "in my face". I think that a visual aid would be great to use. I have a bunch of statistics for my speech, so I have to be careful not to overwhelm the audience. One of the previous speech buddy videos had a lot of statistics
ReplyDeleteMy favorite point that you brought up is using the beginning of a story as an attention getter. I have never tried starting a story in the beginning of a speech and ending it in the conclusion, but that is a fantastic idea. I don’t actually think I have seen it been done before, so it could also come as a surprise to the audience also and get them connected. This could be super useful next week for me, because I am doing my speech on a sport I am involved in, and I have so many suspenseful stories that can really get the audience involved. You could also incorporate humor into this story. Great ideas!
ReplyDeleteThe attention getter is one of my most favorite aspects of a speech. I enjoy listening to a speech wondering what they are going to do or say to get my attention and then mentally rate them on how good or bad they did. When writing a speech, I enjoy the fact that the attention getter has no rules. It allows you to do things more out of the box than other aspects of your speech does. I like the opportunity I have to see how creative I can be with the attention getter and deciding what kind of feeling or emotion I want to convey in the audience and using an attention getter to bring that to pass.
ReplyDelete