A personal favorite of mine is to end with a question suggested by the talk, something related that broadens the discussion and gets people thinking. But let’s say you want something more original and exciting. That remains my go-to recommendation for anyone who wants a way to signal to the audience that it’s time to applaud and then head for the bar. The simplest way to end a speech, after you’ve finished the content part, is to say, “thank you.” That has the virtue of being individually understood, unexceptional, and unambiguous. OK, so how should you end a speech? Following are five suggestions, in order to avoid the dreaded “Any Questions” slide.ġ. With some exceptions, it adds to our information load, overwhelming it even faster, and causing us to tune out. That’s tiring and indeed annoying for us, so we get cranky and tune out. So the result is two incomplete sets of information. When we switch, we lose a bit of either information stream. When we look at the slides, we get another set. So when we’re looking at the speaker, we’re getting one set of cues. Now, reading slides and looking at people occupy two different parts of our brain, and there’s a lot of inefficiency in switching back and forth. So what really happens when we’re confronted in a meeting or a presentation with a speaker and a set of slides is that we look at the speaker-because we’re inherently more interested in people than pictures-and when our attentions start to wander, then we look at the slides. Moreover, the research on how our brains process visual information indicates that we don’t actually see what’s in front of us, but rather an approximation of it that our brain matches to reality based on its memory banks.

We first pay attention to one thing, and then another. And all the research on multitasking shows that we can’t do it. Slide-ware like PowerPoint doesn’t help it distracts, because it requires us to multitask. It would be hard to imagine a duller (and less engaging) way to finish, aside from simply walking off the stage in silence.įirst of all, there’s the slide issue itself.

How should you close a speech? I recently had a query from a fellow coach who specializes in working with engineers and tech firms, and her complaint was that far too many speeches in her experience ended with a slide reading “Any Questions?” She was asking for alternative ways to end a presentation.

Public speaking speech sample