Audience engagement is like a child in a toy store—if you don’t deliberately guide it, it will wander away from you. For presenters and public speakers looking to improve communication skills, discover here are four powerful techniques for capturing and holding audience attention during presentations. Learn how to effectively use rhythm, speed, pauses, and tone of voice to keep your delivery engaging and impactful.

Here’s the thing about human attention, evolutionarily speaking: if you are lounging around the water hole with the other creatures of the savannah, you don’t keep staring at the reeds along the banks. Because nothing is happening there that needs your attention. You tune them out, and pay attention to other things, like getting the drink you came for. But you bloody well pay attention when those reeds rustle. Because if you don’t, chances are you don’t get to pass on your inattentive genes to future generations.

This evolutionary aspect of attention has been hijacked and exploited by our various media; capitalizing on its ability to seize our attention by constantly rustling the reeds in diabolically clever ways. As a public speaker, you must learn to exercise specific presentation skills to engage your audience. Presenters must take active measures to overcome the ferocious tendency of modern audience attention to wander in search of stimulation.

Surprisingly many presenters, speakers, podcast hosts and their guests, and even conversation partners behave as if their audience had an infinite capacity for staring at reeds. Their delivery is unwavering in rhythm, pace, or tone, and it is especially devoid of pauses. Imagine a piece of music that was just the same three notes played over and over again at a steady beat. As soon as your brain realizes the music is not changing—the reeds are not rustling—it attenuates, or withdraws its attention from the music, and treats it as background noise, ignoring it. This is why one of your most effective communication skills is to introduce variation that reawaken the audience’s attention and brings it back where it belongs—to you.

Obviously you could shout “Hey! Pay attention!” at random intervals throughout your delivery, but this tends to have undesirable side effects. Better to employ more subtle and less annoying techniques for audience engagement, such as:

Rhythm, or Cadence

Far too many speakers deliver what they have to say in an unwavering rhythm. The result is a pattern of sound that before long starts to resemble the same notes being played over and over, and the audience’s brain tunes it out. So—when speaking, remember that natural human speech has different rhythms. And—rhythm in speech is key to keeping things interesting. We expect it to be there; we have evolved to respond to it. We take a breath, we emphasize certain points, we slow down to draw attention and indicate mood. Pay attention to the rhythms you hear when listening to people talking, and notice their effect on your response. Practice deliberately introducing ones you like into your own speaking, to keep things interesting.

Speed

When presenting, it is sometimes hard to resist the tendency to speak more rapidly because we are nervous or excited. But resist we must. A delivery that is too rapid and continuous exhausts the audience’s ability—and desire—to keep up. Audiences will involuntarily turn their attention away. If you don’t believe me, listen to some modern college debate speech. So—experiment with deliberately calming the speed of your speaking. This is not that difficult to master, but does require practice. Try rehearsing your delivery at a deliberate, measured pace when alone, so that you can that pace in your head when presenting for real. This is one of the key most important techniques to master—the ability to proceed deliberately even when your physiology wants to go faster.

Rests

I have written specifically about pauses elsewhere, but they are worth revisiting briefly here. Think of the final moments in the Lord of the Rings (The Return of the King) when Frodo puts on the Ring of Power inside the caverns of Mount Doom. Immediately the Eye of Sauron drops its preoccupation with the armies of men, dwarves, and elves massing outside the gates of Mordor, and whirls around to see what is happening inside the volcano. You have this same power to recall your audience’s attention from wherever it was, and swing it back around to you, the presenter. Every time you pause in your delivery, you are effectively rustling the reeds, reminding the collective audience brain that there is something they need to attend to.

A bright note for those whose delivery is littered with the dreaded filler words “um,” “ah,” “you know,” “like,” “you know what I mean?” and their ilk: With a little determined practice, it is possible to catch these before they come out of your mouth, and in their place simply let there be momentary pauses in your delivery. Do not worry about how it will sound—the gaps in your speech will make you sound more thoughtful, and your audience will appreciate the chances to catch up.

Tone of voice

What is the opposite of “monotone”? That is what you are aiming for—variation in your tone of voice as you speak; variation that will keep your audience’s attention engaged. A delivery with no variation in tone (animated, serious, lively, excited, dramatic…) is a drone, not a melody. The audience’s brain tries to turn it into background noise and attend to something that is changing. Deliberately varying tone of voice is the difference between a black-and-white photograph of maple trees and a vibrant display of fall foliage.

Finally, an aside about silences (rests): If your relationship with silence in conversation has only ever been panicky avoidance—which is more or less our cultural norm--you will tend to avoid it while presenting. But silence is a very powerful tool. There are benefits, therefore, to developing a feeling about silence that is not fearful. The way to do this is to find situations that are safe, and use them to explore silence deliberately—walking in the woods, sitting alone in a library, meditating, standing in line in a post office, or noticing the spaces between musical notes; whatever opportunity presents itself. The payoff is, over time, the ability to be silent or use silence just as masterfully and with as much confidence as you use any of your other presentation skills. Give it a try.

If you don’t have your audience’s attention, your excellent content is like a radio lecture on a station your audience is not tuned in to. If you want them tuned in to what you are saying, so that they do get your message, you will want to learn how and when to rustle those reeds. Adding these techniques to your repertoire of communication skills will help you do this.