What are the 5 most important quick ideas for improving your public speaking?  I’m going to go for broke this week and blog on 5 quick takes in 5 days.  Put them together and you should have a good ‘cheat sheet’ for fulfilling your resolution to improve your public speaking in 2012. 

2.  Don’t do Q and A at the end.   Most people who have an hour speaking slot talk for 45 minutes or so and then take questions.  Here’s the problem with that.  People’s attention spans last about 20 minutes, by most measures, so by 45 minutes, you’ve taken your audience through 2 attention cycles and haven’t given it a chance to respond or clear up any confusions.  And once the questions do come, you’re at the mercy of the questioners.  The session ends, not with your brilliant, prepared thoughts, but with the last dumb question some yo-yo finally dredges up.

Instead, stop for questions at 20 minutes and 40 minutes.  Then, if you wish, give people one last chance to ask questions at 50 minutes, but save 5 minutes of your speech to finish with, so that you deliver a killer close and control the ending, which is what the audience remembers best.