In the course of your PhD, various number of times you have be behind the podium giving presentations. You supervisor may expect from you to participate in seminars, workshops and conferences and give paper presentations. But it isn’t really certain that all these opportunities would expose you to an audience that is academic. Sometimes your audience may be purely non-academic and here you are prepared with a technically academic presentation in front of them, how do you deal with it?
I am going to give you certain suggestions here to deal with an audience that wouldn’t be able to relate with you r academic content. How do you keep them engrossed? Here you go:
Keep your beginning simple: It is always better to get some idea about the kind of audience you are going to deal with before you go for an event. If you are ti deal with a non-academic audience, it is necessary that your beginning is very simple and easy to understand. Jargons, difficult terminology and scientific connotations used in the beginning can sometimes put off the interest of the audience and you may not be able to bring them back into your talk throughout.
Structure out your content: you need to structure out your content in such a way that it keeps the audience involved and makes it interactive to the extent possible. Incorporating activity based small inputs can help break the monotony and generate interest of the audience in a topic that may be completely novice to them otherwise. Keep the conversations as natural as possible with minimal incorporations of technicalities is a way to not let them feel left out and neglected.
Do good ice breaking: it is important to break the ice with a set of audience who is new to you and vice versa. In the beginning if you successfully break the ice with them and put them in a comfort zone by striking a wavelength with them, they want to listen to you more. In addition to that, you also get to know what they want to hear and you can focus your talk accordingly.
Even after doing all this and more, you may not find it very easy. There would be challenges here of varied kinds and may be subjective to the nature of the audience. Primarily I can say is stay natural move around a lot, connect and win over the audience by becoming familiar and friendly.
