Presentation Skills Training: Using Negative Space to Captivate Your Audience
Pauses and silence—'negative space'—are powerful tools for capturing your audience’s attention, and their use should definitely be part of your presentation skills training. Comedian Dick Shawn's techniques demonstrate how to build suspense, control audience engagement, and make a lasting impression—skills that can be applied to any presentation you deliver.
Dick Shawn, comedian and film actor, once staged a one-man show he called “The Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World”—a sendup of Sammy Davis Jr.’s signature self-billing. When the curtain went up on the first act, there was nothing on the stage but a large heap of crumpled-up newspapers. For several long seconds, nothing happened. Eventually, the pile of papers stirred, and Shawn himself, attired in shabby tweeds and a porkpie hat, would sit up in the midst of them, looking around at the audience as if he were as surprised to see them as they were to see him. From there he would slowly stand up, continuing to stare out at the audience, but saying nothing. At one point, without ever taking his eyes off the audience, he would reach into his pocket, pull out a banana, and start eating it.
Eventually, Shawn broke into the opening monologue of the show (“Used to be, the seeds in the grapes would slow you down, prevent you from eating too many, watering down your system. Now they invented seedless grapes. You can eat a pound of grapes in one sitting—but you have dysentery for a week!”), and the show expanded from there.
Shawn referred to this technique—of remaining silent with a whole house eagerly waiting for something to happen—as “digging yourself a hole.” It was a deliberate manipulation of the audience’s attention, meant to build suspense and anticipation. And it worked: by the time Shawn started speaking, the relief of the tension made the audience that much more receptive to his opening gags.
Shawn had trained himself to be comfortable working in that silence, and working with it, to focus the audience’s attention where he wanted it (on him), and getting laughs without saying a word. This same tool is available to every presenter—maybe not the getting laughs part, but definitely the ability to grab an audience’s attention and refocus it on themselves (audiences have remarkably short attention spans these days, thanks to you-know-whats). All a presenter has to do is to become deliberate about being silent, and to be comfortable letting silence be there.
Silence or pauses also allow for audience attention to adjust, to process, to catch up, to rest, to get ready. All of which are things you as presenter want your audience to be doing throughout the presentation. Give your audience plenty of opportunities to do these things. Which simply means learning to punctuate your speech delivery with brief pauses. Make a point, pause to let it land before launching into the next one. Over time you will find a natural cadence for this, one that suits the presentation you are making.
Which brings up the subject of time. Obviously, pausing more will make the presentation (a little) longer. So this is an opportunity to review your overall script with an eye to even more conciseness This will focus attention on the really significant points you know you need to make. And will help give each one of them the separate attention it deserves.
The composer John Cage contended that the spaces between the notes are just as integral to the music as the notes themselves. Chopin is famous for stretching the space before the next note to the breaking point, building anticipation and maximizing the feeling of resolution when it finally arrives. Not to get too metaphysical about this, but a presentation is really a long silence punctuated by bursts of speech. In a way, a presenter or speaker is not so much pumping out a stream of words, as deciding how to decorate the silence which both speaker and audience inhabit together.
So don’t shy away from silence, mostly in the form of deliberate pauses, during a presentation. They are like commas in text—we expect them to be there. Experiment; discover its ability to command your audience’s attention. You will find every bit as powerful a device as giant fonts, bold type, or a louder voice.