Chapter 5 Delivery: You, the Room, and the Audience

Abstract

Delivery is your interaction with the audience and with the room. Voice, gestures, eye contact, stance, movement—all of these contribute to delivery. How you deliver your presentation affects not only how intently the audience listens to you, but also whether your audience trusts you. According to Michael Faraday, “[Lectures] depend entirely for their value on the manner in which they are given. It is not the matter, not the subject, so much as the [person].”2 What Faraday meant here was not that the quality of the content was unimportant, but that no matter what the subject is, the audience will be engaged only if the speaker delivers that subject in an engaging way. For instance, over the years, one of the most popular courses at Cornell has been beekeeping. Is that because so many students attend Cornell because they want to become apiarists? No. The reason for the course’s popularity has been that the faculty members are so passionate about beekeeping and know the subject so well that students naturally have become interested.