I’ll answer for both sides, as the presenter and as the audience member.
As the presenter, you want to structure your talk with repetition around central points in mind, as well as rely on heuristic anchors. It’s unlikely that people are going to remember the nuances in what you are talking about in context. If you are talking about math for 60 minutes, continued references about math compete for people’s memory. So when you want to anchor the audience to a concept, tie it to something very much unrelated to the topic you are primarily presenting on. For example, if talking about matrix multiplication, you might title the section “tic tac toe speed dating.” It’s a nonsense statement that you can weave into discussion about sequential translations of two dimensional grids that is just weird enough people will hear it through the noise of “math, math, math.”
Then, you want to repeat the key point for that section again as you finish the section, and again at the conclusion of the talk summarizing your main points from each section, anchoring each summary around the heuristic you used. This technique is so successful I’ve had people I presented to talk to me 15 years later remembering some of the more outlandish heuristic anchors I used—and more importantly, the points I was tying to them.
As the audience member, the best way to save face on zoning out is to just structure your question as “When you talked about ____, it wasn’t clear to me what my takeaway should be. What should I walk away knowing about that?” This way you don’t need to say something like “I kind of got bored and was thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch—did I miss anything important?” Just “what should I know from that section?”
A good presenter will have padded the section a bit so summarizing what they think the main point was shouldn’t take much time. It’s also useful feedback for them as if you zoned out there, it’s likely others did too so they might revisit or rework it if they plant to present it again.
And finally, most presenters should treat a question like that as their failure, not yours. If I’m presenting, it’s my job to confer the information, not your job to absorb it. If I’m not engaging enough or clear enough in that conveyance, you bet I’d want to know about it. The worst thing to have happen as a presenter is zero questions at the end. By all means ask a question like “wait, wtf were you talking about in the middle there?” over just silently walking out to lunch bewildered, confused, and apathetic.
I’ll answer for both sides, as the presenter and as the audience member.
As the presenter, you want to structure your talk with repetition around central points in mind, as well as rely on heuristic anchors. It’s unlikely that people are going to remember the nuances in what you are talking about in context. If you are talking about math for 60 minutes, continued references about math compete for people’s memory. So when you want to anchor the audience to a concept, tie it to something very much unrelated to the topic you are primarily presenting on. For example, if talking about matrix multiplication, you might title the section “tic tac toe speed dating.” It’s a nonsense statement that you can weave into discussion about sequential translations of two dimensional grids that is just weird enough people will hear it through the noise of “math, math, math.”
Then, you want to repeat the key point for that section again as you finish the section, and again at the conclusion of the talk summarizing your main points from each section, anchoring each summary around the heuristic you used. This technique is so successful I’ve had people I presented to talk to me 15 years later remembering some of the more outlandish heuristic anchors I used—and more importantly, the points I was tying to them.
As the audience member, the best way to save face on zoning out is to just structure your question as “When you talked about ____, it wasn’t clear to me what my takeaway should be. What should I walk away knowing about that?” This way you don’t need to say something like “I kind of got bored and was thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch—did I miss anything important?” Just “what should I know from that section?”
A good presenter will have padded the section a bit so summarizing what they think the main point was shouldn’t take much time. It’s also useful feedback for them as if you zoned out there, it’s likely others did too so they might revisit or rework it if they plant to present it again.
And finally, most presenters should treat a question like that as their failure, not yours. If I’m presenting, it’s my job to confer the information, not your job to absorb it. If I’m not engaging enough or clear enough in that conveyance, you bet I’d want to know about it. The worst thing to have happen as a presenter is zero questions at the end. By all means ask a question like “wait, wtf were you talking about in the middle there?” over just silently walking out to lunch bewildered, confused, and apathetic.