Making some effort over public speaking

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If we’ve been invited to speak about animal rights in public, we need to establish if the audience is predominantly hostile or warm, and adjust our tone accordingly.  They’ll go cold on us if we're boring or start haranguing them.  An audience will have a collective nose for pompous vegans becoming judgemental so, first up, we must show we are friendly and have something useful to say.

But whether friendly or unfriendly, the audience isn’t under any obligation to stay listening, so we mustn’t lecture them.  If we want to hold their interest, we need to give them something to think seriously about.  Something original, a new slant on what could be a hackneyed theme, and proof that we’ve spent time preparing the talk by showing video footage, pictures, giving examples, and telling stories. Do anything to avoid our talk becoming too dense.

Out of respect to an unknown group of people, we must make it impossible for them to be bored.  Since this is a subject which is difficult and confronting, our talk should move along at a lick.   Without bragging about it, we can give an account of how we’ve experienced the transition to veganism and animal rights, and we lose no face by admitting to any personal difficulties we’ve had; anything to ease the difficulties being envisaged by a listening audience.

The content of the talk might consist of information about animal exploitation and about the implications of a vegan lifestyle on those who want to become advocates for exploited animals.  But if we really want to hold an audience’s attention, they need to know how long we are going to talk.  By keeping it to 20-30 minutes, and reminding listeners that questions and comments are going to be asked for, and by keeping a timer ticking along to remind ourselves how time is passing, our talk is never allowed to become an open ended ramble.